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Indian Ocean

CURREN!

SIX ARTISTIC NARRATIVES

SHIRAZ BAYJOO * SHILPA GUPTA - NICHOLAS HLOBO
WANGECHI MUTU : PENNY SIOPIS - HAJRA WAHEED

Prasannan Parthasarathi, editor
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College

This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives in the Daley Family and Monan
Galleries at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, January 27—May 31, 2020. Organized by the McMullen Museum, /ndian
Ocean Current has been curated by Prasannan Parthasarathi and Salim Currimjee and underwritten by Boston College with major
support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum and Liliane and Christian Haub in honor of Marie-Liliane 713, Maximilian ’14, and
Constantin 717 Haub.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948581
ISBN: 978-1-892850-40-9

Distributed by the University of Chicago Press
Printed in the United States of America
© 2020 The Trustees of Boston College

Copyeditor: Kate Shugert
Designer: John McCoy

Artists’ works appear with these acknowledgments:

© 2005—06, 2009-10, 2013 Shilpa Gupta, courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and La
Habana

Front: Penny Siopis (b. 1953), detail of Warm Waters [5], 2018-19, glue, ink, and oil on paper, 12.2 x 8.7 in., 111

Endpaper (front): Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972), detail of /’m too Misty, 2015, collage painting on linoleum, 40 x 33 in., 92

Flyleaf (front): Nicholas Hlobo (b. 1975), detail of Amatholana asibhozo, 2017, ribbon and leather on canvas, 19.7 (diam.) x 2.1 in., 66,
74

Flyleaf (back): Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976), detail of Untitled (There Is No Border Here), 2005—06, wall drawing with self-adhesive tape,
118 x 118 in., 40

Endpaper (back): Hajra Waheed (b. 1980), detail of Untitled (MAP), 2016, infographic print on vellum, 304 x 25 in., 152—55

Back: Shiraz Bayjoo (b. 1979), Extraordinary Quarantines #38, 2014, giclée print, 20 x 20 in., 23

CONTENTS

Preface 1

Introduction 3
Salim Currimjee & Prasannan Parthasarathi

The Indian Ocean World 9
David Northrup

Shiraz Bayjoo 15

Slavery and Histories of Unfreedom in the Indian Ocean 29
Pedro Machado

Shilpa Gupta 39

What the Ocean Gives Us to Think 53
Kalpana R. Seshadri

Nicholas Hlobo 63

Colonialism’s Afterlives and Invocations of Oceanic History 75
Sana Aiyar

Wangechi Mutu 85
The Indian Ocean after 1945 93

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard
Penny Siopis 103

Climate Change and the Future of the IndianOcean 141
Sunil Amrith

Hajra Waheed 151
The State of the Indian Ocean: A Scientific Perspective 183

Zara Currimjee

Preface

In 2016 Prasannan Parthasarathi, a professor in Boston College’s History Depart-
ment, spoke to me about his long-standing research and teaching interests in the history
of the Indian Ocean. He was writing a book on environmental change in nineteenth-cen-
tury South India and had just returned from a research trip to Mauritius where he had
studied the records of migrants from South India to that island. While there he had seen
his old friend, the architect Salim Currimjee, founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art
Indian Ocean, a platform for art education and public programming. He and Currimjee
wondered if the McMullen might consider an exhibition of works by contemporary artists
from lands bordering the ocean, one that would speak to the movement of goods, ideas,
and people across it and to the consequences of its current rising water levels.

Embracing the idea, the McMullen team met with Parthasarathi and Currimjee only
to realize that the project had even richer possibilities than originally envisioned for
exploring relationships between art and climate change. The project team then widened
to include experts in climate science: Gail Kineke, a professor from Boston College’s
Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, scientists Hyodae Seo, Sujata Murty,
and Caroline Ummenhofer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Christo-
pher Scotese of Northwestern University and the Field Museum.

Concurrently, Currimjee proposed artists whose work in various media probe and
stimulate dialogue about concerns within the diverse communities that now populate
the Indian Ocean world. The McMullen was delighted when six outstanding artists with
roots in different communities surrounding the western Indian Ocean, Shiraz Bayjoo,
Shilpa Gupta, Nicholas Hlobo, Wangechi Mutu, Penny Siopis, and Hajra Waheed agreed
to participate in the exhibition.

The curators then assembled a team of distinguished scholars from a range of
disciplines who were eager to write essays for the catalogue edited by Parthasarathi
about the artists’ work and the issues they engender. The Museum is grateful to Sana
Aiyar, Sunil Amrith, Salim Currimjee, Zara Currimjee, Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, Pedro
Machado, David Northrup, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and Kalpana R. Seshadri for their
contributions.

This exhibition epitomizes what a university museum of art can contribute to the
understanding of a crisis in a distant part of the world when faculty and other experts
from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences collaborate on a project. It could not
have been undertaken without the historical knowledge, vision, dedication, and enthu-
siasm of Prasannan Parthasarathi and the art historical expertise of Salim Currimjee.

To both of them the Museum extends its
deepest thanks for leading this project.
Special thanks are also due to col-
leagues at the McMullen Museum. Assis-
tant Director Diana Larsen has designed
the galleries innovatively to accommodate
both art and scientific displays. Assistant
Director John McCoy designed the cata-
logue and adapted the digital didactics for
the exhibition’s scientific component to
reflect a contemporary aesthetic. Man-
ager of Publications and Exhibitions Kate
Shugert expertly oversaw the editing of
the catalogue in addition to organizing
all the loans. Rachel Chamberlain, Man-
ager of Education, Outreach, and Digital
Resources, has created a series of pro-
grams and events to engage audiences
with the artists’ works and reflect on cur-
rent concerns in the Indian Ocean world.
The spirit of collaboration carried over
into other areas of our University. Profes-
sor of Art Mark Cooper and Professor of
Computer Science Lewis Tseng provided
invaluable advice. The Institute for the
Liberal Arts, directed by Professor Mary
Crane, the Lowell Lecture Series, directed
by Professor James Smith, along with
the Asian Studies, History, and English
Departments have supported related pro-
grams; Jack Dunn and Rosanne Pellegrini
of the Office of University Communications
oversaw publicity; Anastos Chiavaras from
the Office of Risk Management and Peter

Preface

Marino from the Center for Centers have
aided, respectively, with securing insur-
ance and budgeting. James Husson, Diana
Griffith, and Ericka Webb of University
Advancement have helped with funding.

Of course, the exhibition would not
have been possible without the munifi-
cence and cooperation of its lenders. We
extend thanks to each of the artists for
their participation as well as to Ed Cross
Fine Art; Galleria Continua (Mario Cris-
tiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi, Maurizio Rigillo,
and Margherita Tinagli); Lehmann Maupin
(Anna Stothart, Amy Cosier, and Lisa
McCarthy); Stevenson Cape Town (Joost
Bosland and Marc Barben); Studio of
Wangechi Mutu (Astrid Meek); Studio of
Hajra Waheed (Tiffany Le); Museum Voor-
linden, Wassenaar (Suzanne Swarts and
Marie-Fleur Dijk); Midori Yamamura and
Luis H. Francia; and an anonymous private
collector.

The McMullen remains grateful for the
following Museum endowments that pro-
vide vital support for all our projects: Linda
64 and Adam Crescenzi Fund, Janet M.
and C. Michael Daley 58 Fund, Gerard
and Jane Gaughan Fund for Exhibitions,
Hecksher Family Fund, Hightower Family
Fund, John F. McCarthy and Gail M. Bayer
Fund, Christopher J. Toomey ’78 Fund,
and Alison S. and William M. Vareika ’74,
P’09, ’15 Fund.

The McMullen Museum could never
have realized a project involving transport
of works from around the world without
the ongoing support of the administra-
tion of Boston College and the McMullen
Family Foundation. We especially thank
Jacqueline McMullen, President William
P. Leahy, SJ; Provost David Quigley; Vice
Provost Billy Soo; and Morrissey Col-
lege of Arts and Sciences Dean Gregory
Kalscheur, SJ. Major support for the exhi-
bition was provided by the Patrons of the
McMullen Museum, chaired by C. Michael
Daley, and by Liliane and Christian Haub
in honor of Marie-Liliane ’13, Maximilian
"14, and Constantin ’17 Haub.

The contributions of all mentioned
above have our profound appreciation for

making possible /ndian Ocean Current's
timely reflection on an area of urgent con-
cern in our world.

Nancy Netzer
Inaugural Robert L. and Judith T. Winston
Director and Professor of Art History

Introduction

Salim Currimjee & Prasannan Parthasarathi

For thousands of years humans have plied the waters of the Indian Ocean. From
ancient times to the nineteenth century, merchants carried cotton cloth from India to
far-flung lands, returning with cargoes of horses, spices, and precious metals. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, soldiers from East Africa fought in the armies of
kings in western and southern India, on occasion themselves becoming rulers in their
own right. Islam traveled from its home in the Arabian Peninsula across the Indian Ocean
to South and Southeast Asia and for centuries Muslims from these areas have made the
journey in reverse in the great pilgrimage to Mecca. The ocean made all this possible and
for many millennia humans and water have been inextricably linked in the Indian Ocean
world.

Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives explores the contemporary legacy of
this long movement of people, things, and ideas. It showcases the work of six artists with
deep ties to the lands surrounding the western half of the Indian Ocean: Shiraz Bay-
joo, Shilpa Gupta, Nicholas Hlobo, Wangechi Mutu, Penny Siopis, and Hajra Waheed.
Through a variety of mediums and forms—including paintings, videos, collages, sculp-
tures, and photographs—these six artists grapple with the past, present, and future of
the Indian Ocean.

Indian Ocean Current probes complex and vexing questions: How do we make sense
of the great mixing of peoples in the region’s past and present? How do we conceive of
the water that linked distant shores? How do we address the borders that divide spaces
that for so long were undivided? What do the rising waters resulting from global warming
portend for the future of the Indian Ocean and, most importantly, for its inhabitants?

The Indian Ocean is the only ocean in the world in which currents and winds reverse
direction during the year in the system known as the monsoon. As land and water tem-
perature differences wax and wane, currents and winds shift. From April to August, the
winds blow from the southwest to the northeast, reversing direction from December to
March. The seasonal predictability of these shifts made long distance journeys on the
ocean possible from a very early date. This is why the Indian Ocean became the first of
the world’s oceans to be a dense zone of commercial activity. It was a mercantile lake.

The Indian Ocean is a striking illustration of the deep ties between humans and the
geological features of our planet. These features are being reshaped today, an effect of
anthropogenic climate change, and the relationship between humans and water in the
Indian Ocean world is being remade with potentially disastrous consequences.

The richness of commercial life in the
Indian Ocean is what attracted medieval
Europeans to its waters. While few Euro-
peans had direct access to that world,
the products of the Indian Ocean entered
the Mediterranean via sea and land. It
was the fabled riches of the Indian Ocean
that inspired the Portuguese to seek a
sea route around Africa, which they did
successfully in 1498 when Vasco de
Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope
and sailed with the help of an Indian pilot
from East Africa to Calicut in southwest-
ern India. From that date, a succession of
Europeans—Portuguese, Dutch, English,
French, Danish—sailed in its waters.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Shiraz Bayjoo recalls that European
presence with his video Sea Shanty (16—
20). Shanties were songs that sailors sang
while working onboard large vessels. While
the sailors on these ships were drawn from
across the Indian Ocean, as well as all
over the world, the sea shanty came to be
associated with Europeans.

Bayjoo is based in London, but is orig-
inally from Mauritius, an island that lies
1,200 miles off the east coast of Africa.
Mauritius was uninhabited before Europe-
ans entered the Indian Ocean. From the
sixteenth century, it became a port of call
for ships from Europe where they replen-
ished supplies of food and water. Mauritius

Introduction

also exported ebony and sugar to markets
in the Indian Ocean. Sugar plantations
took off after the abolition of slavery in
the British Empire in 1833 and labor-
ers were brought there from across the
Indian Ocean world to cultivate the plant.
Africans, Indians, Southeast Asians, and
Chinese all made homes on the island.
Mauritius is a microcosm of the Indian
Ocean world. Its plural society is where
past and present meet and this is cap-
tured in Bayjoo’s Extraordinary Quaran-
tines (21-24). On the island, the Hindu
god Hanuman, Rama’s trusted devotee
and lieutenant, coexists with a Christian
burial ground. Indians, many descendants
of indentured laborers, but some heirs to
vast merchant fortunes built on the basis
of the Indian Ocean trade, coexist with
Africans, Chinese, and even a Franco-
phone plantocracy.

Wangechi Mutu

Violence and coercion played a role in
the building of plural Indian Ocean societ-
ies, and Wangechi Mutu’s video Amazing
Grace (86-91) reminds us of this history.
Mutu is from Kenya and today divides her
time between Nairobi and Brooklyn, New
York. She is steeped in the worlds of both
the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and her
video reflects this double consciousness—
in it she sings “Amazing Grace” in Kikuyu.

The author of “Amazing Grace,” John
Newton (1725-1807), was a British
abolitionist who influenced, among others,
William Wilberforce, Hannah More, and
William Cowper. Newton had been a slave
trader in his early years, and the hymn
celebrates his delivery from that path of
sin. Although “Amazing Grace” was written
in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, it
has relevance for the Indian Ocean as well.

The Atlantic dominates discussions
of modern slavery, but the Indian Ocean
had a long history of slave trading. While
this history predated the coming of Euro-
peans, the Portuguese, Dutch, French,
and English took to the commerce and
purchased enslaved persons in major
entrepdts to work in their fortresses, cities,

and plantations. Between 1400 and 1900
it is estimated that 2.6 million individuals
from Africa were traded as slaves in the
Indian Ocean. For the sake of compari-
son, in the same period some 12.5 million
enslaved Africans were traded in the
Atlantic.

The indentured labor system, in which
laborers entered into long-term agree-
ments to migrate and work on plantations,
emerged after slavery was abolished in
the early nineteenth century. It rested on
coercion as well and Hugh Tinker, an early
historian of the system, labeled it “a new
system of slavery.”! While that analogy to
slavery is now thought to be overstated, it
nevertheless points to the violence upon
which even indentured labor rested. The
pluralism of the Indian Ocean world was
a product of the violent displacement of
many millions.

Shilpa Gupta

The plural world of the Indian Ocean
began to be torn asunder from the 1930s
with the economic crisis of the Great
Depression, nationalist movements that
challenged the European colonial order,
and World War Il. Nations came to be
defined in exclusive terms, at times along
ethnic lines and at other moments and
places along religious ones. The Indian
Ocean world has been home to riots
against foreigners and successive waves of
expulsions of outsiders. Indians have been
expelled from East Africa, Muslims from
India, Hindus from Pakistan, and Rohingya
from Burma.

After World War II, decolonization
and the end of empire came to the Indian
Ocean and nation-states were created,
and with them borders were erected.
Shilpa Gupta of Mumbai, India, subjects
these borders to her critical eye and
exposes them for the artificial construc-
tions that they are. Untitled (There Is No
Border Here/No hay frontera aqui) (40—
41) points to the impossibility of separat-
ing peoples and territories. “I tried very
hard to cut the sky in half, one for my lover
and one for me, but the sky kept moving

and clouds from his territory came into
mine/Me esforcé intensamente por dividir
el cielo en dos, una parte para mi amado,
y otra para mi, pero el cielo continud
moviéndose y las nubes de su territorio
invadieron mi espacio,” the flags proclaim.
The works that comprise Fenced Borders
(46—51) speak to the geographical and
cultural connections that unite across
borders, whether they are a shared love of
mangoes or mangrove trees rooted in the
swampy soils of the Sundarbans. Gupta
speaks to the refusal of many in the Indian
Ocean world to allow borders and nation-
states to divide.

Nicholas Hlobo

Politics in the Indian Ocean world
are not found only in the large scale,
but operate at the level of the personal
and intimate as well. Nicholas Hlobo of
Johannesburg, South Africa, works ina
variety of media to explore questions of
masculinity, sexuality, ethnicity, and race.
South Africa is a diverse society, in part
due to its longstanding connections across
the Indian Ocean to the Indian subcon-
tinent. At the same time, Hlobo draws
upon postapartheid South Africa and his
Xhosa culture (reflected in the titles of
his works in this exhibition) to explore
both past and present and imagine a new
future. The work boots and industrial
materials in Ngumgudu nemizano (64—65)
evoke simultaneously hard labor and
fetish wardrobes. In Amatholana asibhozo
(66—74) Hlobo joins together a stereotyp-
ically masculine attribute, leather, with
a feminine one, ribbon. They are literally
stitched together—blurring the divides
between masculine and feminine and the
home and the outside world. The stitching
additionally recalls Hlobo’s grandmother
whom he watched embroidering when he
was a young boy.

Hlobo’s work also brings to mind the
sea and its animals. The flabby leather bag
of Ngumgudu nemizano suggests a fluid
underwater creature such as an octopus.
The stitching of Amatholana asibhozo
resembles eels, animals that travel long

distances, journeying from freshwater to
salt in order to breed. The eel represents
the long and difficult path that Hlobo
himself has taken. His work powerfully
points to the multiple ways of being in the
contemporary Indian Ocean world and the
fluidity and multiplicity of the self.

Hajra Waheed

Since 1945 the Indian Ocean world
has become the world’s center of oil
extraction, an activity that in the words
of Gabrielle Hecht is “turning our planet
inside out.”* The deposits of oil in the
western stretches of the ocean, on
lands bordering the Persian Gulf, are the
lifeblood of the global economy. Hajra
Waheed, now based in Montréal, Can-
ada, explores the mindsets and the sheer
human effort that make possible this work
of extraction. Untitled (MAP) (152-55) is
a classified map of the largest offshore oil
field in the world, located 165 miles north
of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the artist
spent her youth. It “speaks to the fact
that surveillance does not live solely on a
horizontal plane or two-dimensional map,
but manifests as a vertical occupation on
a scale that reaches from satellites in the
sky to below the surface of the sea.”? And
this is all done in the name of extraction.

The burning of petroleum, along with
coal and natural gas, has released enor-
mous quantities of heat trapping gases
into our planet’s atmosphere. Concentra-
tions of carbon dioxide have gone from
280 parts per million in the preindustrial
period, to more than 400. As a result,
global temperatures have risen 1°C,
leading to warmer oceanic waters. The
Indian Ocean is especially vulnerable to
this warming. Between 2000 and 2015
it has absorbed 70% of the heat that has
been pumped into the world’s oceans. The
northern Indian Ocean has seen some of
the biggest increases in sea level in the
world, threatening the tens of millions who
live along that coastline.

Penny Siopis

The rising waters of the Indian Ocean
inspired Penny Siopis of Cape Town, South
Africa, to undertake the works that are
included in Indian Ocean Current. She
Breathes Water (104—9) is a film assem-
bled from found footage that laments the
damage that humans have wrought upon
our planet. Foreseeing the possibility of a
world in which humans will cease to exist,
she asks, “Can you imagine the world
without you?” Warm Waters (110—39) is a
series of paintings that consist of ink, glue,
and oil on paper. Siopis writes, “The mate-
rial process of the paintings is a fluid affair;
the glue’s capacity to change its form
and colour when it comes into contact
with other forces—air, gravity, water, my
gestures—imbues it with a presence that
holds onto itself as ‘something other,’ yet
can simultaneously take on the guise of an
image.” The colors overflow the borders of
the works, mirroring the rising waters of
the Indian Ocean, refusing to be confined
or constrained. Is this the human future?
In these paintings Siopis was inspired as
well by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul
et Virginie, set on Mauritius during French
rule. For Siopis, Mauritius, a tropical
island, is “an ideal ‘figure’ through which
to imagine the ‘ground’ of rising waters.”*

The essays in this catalogue provide
the context for the works on display in
Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narra-
tives.

David Northrup’s “The Indian Ocean
World” gives a succinct but “deep” history
of the ocean and it is a foundation for the
chapters that follow. Northrup writes that
ships crossed the waters of the Indian
Ocean from at least the third millennium
BCE. In Roman times the trading world
of the Indian Ocean was linked to that
of the Mediterranean to its west and the
South China Sea to its east. Over cen-
turies the density of commerce on the
ocean’s waters increased and outsiders
were drawn to its trading routes, from the
Chinese during the Ming dynasty to Euro-

peans from the fifteenth century. Northrup
ends his account with the rise of European
empires in the nineteenth century and
dramatic technological transformations

in production and transport. These led to
a radical reordering of the Indian Ocean
world.

In his “Slavery and Histories of
Unfreedom in the Indian Ocean,” Pedro
Machado explores the forms of involuntary
migration that were found in the Indian
Ocean. It is difficult to avoid comparisons
with slavery in the Atlantic, given that
system looms large in all discussions of
servitude. Nevertheless, several differ-
ences stand out. First, the persons who
were enslaved in the Indian Ocean were
primarily Asians, not Africans. Second, the
work that the enslaved did varied widely
in the Indian Ocean. They did not work
predominantly on plantations, as was
the case in the Atlantic. Finally, when the
plantation complex did expand in the nine-
teenth century, it was after slavery was
abolished. Much of the plantation labor
force was brought as indentured servants,
largely from India, to Mauritius, Natal, and
elsewhere.

Kalpana R. Seshadri’s “What the
Ocean Gives Us to Think” is a profound
meditation on the ocean. Seventy percent
of our planet is covered by the waters of
its oceans. The oceans are what color our
planet blue. Yet green is the color of envi-
ronmentalism, a sign of our terrestrial bias.
No summary can do the essay justice. Let
us quote an important passage: “Because
the Ocean is deep, it gives us to think
‘depth,’ and in-depth. That the Ocean
gives us to think depth is ‘deeply’ conse-
quential. Without a concept of depth, we
could not conceptualize something called
the truth or morality.” This is why Seshadri
urges us “to listen to the Ocean speak.”

Just as violence was present when
the plural world of the Indian Ocean was
formed, it was there when that world
was dissolved in the middle decades of
the twentieth century. Sana Aiyar, in her
“Colonialism’s Afterlives and Invocations
of Oceanic History,” reminds us of long-

Introduction

standing tensions in the Indian Ocean
world, arising from economic inequality,
religious difference, and ethnic and racial
competition and discrimination. These
tensions were heightened in the straitened
economic conditions of the Great Depres-
sion in the 1930s, erupting in the form of
riots and violence against “outsiders”—in
many cases Indians. These antagonisms
continued to simmer in the decades after
World War II when the age of empire
came to a close in the Indian Ocean world
and was succeeded by decolonization
and independence. New nations with

new borders emerged and new citizens
were defined. In East Africa, Burma, and
elsewhere Indians were seen as a “colonial
hangover” who held back “real” citizens.
Such conflicts played out in India itself in
the bloody end of empire that was Parti-
tion.

After 1945, European empires in the
Indian Ocean came to an end and were
replaced by nation-states, a shift Bérénice
Guyot-Réchard traces in her essay, “The
Indian Ocean after 1945.” This did not
mean the end of a European and later
North American presence, as the ocean
became a site for Cold War rivalries. Oil,
which became easier to ship with revolu-
tions in transport such as the tanker, mag-
nified the importance of the Indian Ocean
and choke points like the Straits of Hor-
muz became global hot spots. Many of the
newly independent nations in the Indian
Ocean world rejected these superpower
intrusions, giving rise to an Afro-Asian bloc
of countries that pushed an alternative
program of non-alignment, anti-imperi-
alism, and anti-racism. Afro-Asianism,
with its geographical center in the Indian
Ocean, also challenged the hegemony of
Europe in intellectual, cultural, and artistic
life. Afro-Asianism culminated in the
1970s with calls for an Indian Ocean “zone
of peace,” but these efforts foundered as a
consequence of nationalism and competi-
tion for the riches of the ocean. The silent
victim was the ocean itself.

The final two essays deal with climate
change. Sunil Amrith’s “Climate Change

and the Future of the Indian Ocean” traces
the long meteorological and climatological
engagement with the ocean. For Europe-
ans and others, charting the currents and
winds and their shifts over the seasons of
the year was Critical for the dominance

of the ocean’s waters. This became less
imperative in the age of steam when fossil
fuels allowed humans to transcend the
rhythms of nature. In that period, the
Indian Ocean world underwent enormous
environmental changes, much of it on land
where forests were cut, the arable was
expanded, and agriculture was intensified.
But the ocean never disappeared from
view. In the twentieth century it came to
be seen as a resource for growing popu-
lations. And new scientific tools led toa
revived interest in the Indian Ocean’s role
in both local and global climate. This is
why the Indian Ocean became a key site
for documenting anthropogenic climate
change.

Zara Currimjee picks up where Amrith
leaves off. She notes in her essay, “The
State of the Indian Ocean: A Scientific
Perspective,” that the Indian Ocean is the
least understood of the world’s oceans.
Comprehensive scientific studies of its
waters began only in the late 1950s.
However, it is widely acknowledged that
the Indian Ocean plays a key role in the
heating of our planet; that the oceanic
ecosystem is under intense pressure; and
that coastal and island communities are
extremely vulnerable. In 2014, scientists
in Pune, India, reported that for the last
century the western Indian Ocean has
been warming more rapidly than any other
tropical ocean. The reasons for this are
still not understood, but the ramifications
are enormous. As a result of warmer
waters, phytoplankton populations have
fallen, reducing supplies of food for count-
less species of fish, leading to declines
in a range of marine animals. Cyclones
have intensified, and wrought devasta-
tion across the region. Another result of
warmer water is rising ocean levels. In
the past thirty years, the northern Indian
Ocean has risen almost twice as fast as

the global average (0.12 inches per year
versus the global rate of 0.07 inches per
year). Across the Indian Ocean, coastal
cities, as well as islands that are home
to many millions, are in grave danger of
inundation from these waters.

The configuration of land and water in
the Indian Ocean gave rise to the regular
winds of the monsoon. Those winds made
possible dense exchanges and linkages
for many millennia. As a result of the
extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the
relationship between land and water is
being reordered and the future of life itself
endangered. The six artists who comprise
Indian Ocean Current contend with the
complex past and present of this Indian
Ocean world. They also ask us to confront
a frightening future. The rising waters of
the Indian Ocean will not respect individu-
als, borders, or nation-states. Will we have
the sense to see that?

Salim Currimjee is a practicing architect and artist based in
Mauritius and works throughout the Indian Ocean region. He
studied biology and art history at Williams College and obtained
his MArch from Rice University. In May 2015 he founded ICAIO,
Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, an independent and
nonprofit foundation that is a platform for art education and pub-
lic art programming in Mauritius. Through the visits of interna-
tional contemporary artists engaging with children and students
of Mauritius, ICAIO honors the cultural diversity of the country
and seeks to activate critical thinking and dialogue through the
arts of the region.

Prasannan Parthasarathi is professor of South Asian history at
Boston College. He is the author of The Transition to a Colonial
Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-—
1800 (2001), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton
Textiles (2009), and Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not:
Global Economic Divergence, 1600—1850 (2011), which received
the Jerry Bentley Book Prize of the World History Association and
was named a Choice magazine outstanding academic title. He

is now at work on a study of agriculture and the environment in
nineteenth-century South India.

1 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour
Overseas, 1830—1920 (New York: Institute of Race Relations,
Oxford UP, 1974).

2. Gabrielle Hecht, “Inside-Out Earth,” American Historical Review
(forthcoming).

3 “Hajra Waheed at Small Arms,” Toronto Biennial of Art, https://
torontobiennial.org/work/hajra-waheed-at-small-arms/.

4 “Penny Siopis: Warm Water Imaginaries,” Stevenson, https://www
stevenson. info/exhibition/3917.

Introduction

The Indian Ocean Worl

David Northrup

This essay presents an overview of the development of the sea routes that became
so important in the exchange of goods, the movement of people, and the spread of ideas
and beliefs—all central themes explored in /ndian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives.
Besides presenting a capsule history of the Indian Ocean world, it explores some of the
consequences of the Indian Ocean gradually becoming part of a global maritime system.

For a long time, oceans, lakes, and rivers hindered contacts among people, but
waterways became efficient means of communication and commerce after some
learned how to build rafts, canoes, and boats. The pioneering water travelers navigated
by keeping riverbanks and lake shores in sight, and at first ocean voyagers also stayed
close to the coast so they could tell where they were. Gradually mariners developed the
skills necessary to travel long distances across open water. Thousands of years ago the
Indian Ocean became the first ocean to be crisscrossed by regular water routes that
brought the surrounding lands into regular contact.?

Early Indian Ocean Trade

In many ways water travel was an extension of overland routes, but it had the distinct
advantages of being much faster and cheaper. By using sails to capture the wind, vessels
became much more efficient than land caravans for transporting cargo and passengers.
Maritime trading began early and in several different parts of the Indian Ocean. One
well documented early example is the trade in the Red Sea (an arm of the Indian Ocean)
between ancient Egypt and the land called Punt on the African coast near the southern
end of the sea. That connection went back to the middle of the third millennium BCE,
and from the fifteenth century BCE onward Egyptian texts and scenes carved in stone
(including a sailboat) provide detailed information about the regular trade to and from
Punt. Punt supplied Egypt with gold, ivory, incense, wild animal skins, and cattle. It is
also recorded that King Solomon of Israel in the tenth century BCE sent fleets every
three years to a place called Ophir below the mouth of the Red Sea for similar African
goods, including gold in great quantities.?

Aside from exceptions such as these, the records for the earliest history of Indian
Ocean navigation tend to be few and fragmentary. The first ocean-going vessels would
have been for fishing, with trade being a logical adaptation of that technology. There
are suggestions of maritime trade along the west coast of India from the third millen-
nium BCE. Trade between western India and the Arabian Peninsula existed at least from
Roman times, when the Indian Ocean was clearly part of a much larger system that

extended westward into the Mediterra-
nean and eastward into the South China
Sea. Arabs concentrated their efforts
along the Red Sea, coastal Africa, and

the South Arabian coast, meeting traders
from northwest India at neutral market
towns such as Ormuz at the mouth of

the Persian Gulf. In time, Arab, Indian,
and Persian mariners learned to make
longer voyages across the Arabian Sea,
taking advantage of the monsoon winds,
which blow westward for half the year
then reverse direction. There is evidence
that Indians used star maps to facilitate
nighttime navigation. Besides the Arabs
and Indians, voyagers from the East Indies
crossed the southern Indian Ocean in
outrigger canoes, introducing the banana
to the African mainland and colonizing the
large island of Madagascar. Such voyages
date to the beginning of the Common Era
and ended in the fifteenth century, but the
inhabitants of Madagascar still speak a
language of the family found in Southeast
Asia and the South Pacific.*

As the cargoes of Punt and Ophir
suggest, early trade on land and sea was
mostly in luxury goods for an elite clien-
tele. That would change as larger ships
were built to carry goods aimed at less
elite consumers. In the absence of man-
ifests and cargo lists, the most detailed
evidence of the scope of the Indian Ocean
trade comes from the wreckage of a ship

The Indian
Ocean World

that sank in the Java Sea in the tenth
century CE. Modern divers have retrieved
much of the cargo from that wreck, includ-
ing tin from the Malay Peninsula, silver
from China, bronze statues from India,
and glass beads from Persia. There were
also human bones, from people who may
well have been slaves who were unable

to escape when the ship began to sink
because they were tied up. Just as the
fibers of the rope did not survive the long
submersion, it is likely that the vessel also
carried Indian cottons and Chinese silks.
Typical of the hundreds or even thousands
of vessels then plying the eastern Indian
Ocean, the sunken ship was ninety-feet
long and twenty-five wide, made of wood

1. Relief panel of a ship from the Buddhist temple at Borobudur, Java, c. 800
CE (Peter Cook, Flickr).

2. Dhow, a type of vessel in use in the western Indian Ocean for more than a
millennium, off the coast of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 2010 (Sajjad Sherally
Fazel/Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0).

carefully fitted and attached with dowels,
not nails.*

By the date of this shipwreck, trading
communities around the Indian Ocean
were exchanging a large volume of goods
(fig. 1). With the rise of the Arab Empire
in the seventh century, Muslims grew in
importance in the maritime trade to the
point that the Indian Ocean seemed to be
an Islamic sea. Arabic gradually became a
lingua franca of the Arabian Sea, Islamic
law governed transactions, and a common
faith inspired trust among merchants. This
was important because land-based gov-
ernments did not control the trade routes,
except for rulers of the port cities who
found it in their self-interest to look after
the security of the visiting traders. Once at
sea, merchants were on their own.®

The waterways were in the hands
of many ethnic communities, who were
skilled navigators and successful nego-
tiators with distant merchant partners
(fig. 2). Settlements of Asians and Middle
Easterners became widely dispersed
around the Indian Ocean. For example,
about a thousand years ago the growing
importance of the gold trade from south-
ern Africa attracted Arab and Persian
merchants, who intermarried with coastal
Africans and learned to speak the lan-
guage of the coastal trading cities, which
became known as Swahili (from the Arabic
word meaning “shores”).

The Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta,
who rode merchant ships to reach the rich
trading cities of the Swahili coast in 1331,
described the hospitality he received
from the Muslim rulers and the splendid
buildings he saw. At the eastern end of
the Indian Ocean the important passage
between the island of Sumatra and the
Malay Peninsula provided access to the
spices of the East Indies and the goods of
East Asia.®

Chinese and European Voyages to
the Indies

In the fifteenth century, two outside
states dispatched ships to explore the
riches of the Indian Ocean for quite differ-

ent motives. From the east came spec-
tacular Chinese fleets, sailing through the
ocean as far as the Swahili coast. Between
1403 and 1433, the Ming dynasty, which
had overthrown China’s Mongol rulers
in 1388, sent seven large fleets into the
Indian Ocean under the command of
Admiral Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim.
Meant to display Ming wealth and power,
the first expedition included sixty-two
specially constructed giant ships 300-feet
long and 150-feet wide with waterproof
bulkheads. The purpose was not commer-
cial, even though the expeditions gave rich
“presents” to the rulers along the way and
received lavish gifts in return. Nor were the
fleets intended for military or political gain,
although one defeated a pirates’ nest that
had imperiled trade. Having accomplished
their goal of “showing the flag,” the Ming
discontinued the expeditions, ordered the
ships destroyed, and burned most records
of their accomplishments.

Historians point out the great irony
that these spectacular Ming voyages
were discontinued and largely erased
from memory just decades before a much
smaller and less impressive Portuguese
fleet under Vasco da Gama sailed around
the southern tip of Africa and across the
Indian Ocean to India in 1498. Da Gama’s
fleet opened a new all-water route from
Europe to the fabled commercial riches
of the Indies, but the crusader crosses on
his ships’ sails signaled another somewhat
contradictory motive: to reduce Muslim
power and expand the reach of Christian-
ity. Even though da Gama’s ships would
have been dwarfed by those of the Ming,
the small and powerful cannons mounted
on their decks gave them a sufficient
military edge to gain a lasting place for
the Europeans in the lucrative commercial
networks of the Indian Ocean.’

In 1510 the Portuguese set up a
naval and administrative headquarters
at Goa on the west coast of India and
slowly edged their way into the existing
trading system. The goods flowing back to
Europe attracted the attention of northern
Europeans whose impacts in the Indian

Ocean would be greater because they
were financed by investors in joint-stock
companies, which also had charters from
their governments granting them monop-
oly rights. The most important were the
Dutch East India Company (VOC), which
established its headquarters at Batavia
(now Jakarta, Indonesia) in 1628, and
the London-based East India Company
(EIC), which during the seventeenth
century negotiated the establishment of
three major bases on the coast of India
at Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay (now
called Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai).
The French monarch also created a Com-
pany of the Indies, which was chronically
underfunded compared to the VOC and
EIC. The Indian Ocean had become firmly
linked by a global maritime system to the
Atlantic continents, whose imports were
underwritten by the flow of silver from
Spanish America. Some of this silver also
entered the Indian Ocean world from the
Pacific via the galleons that sailed from
Acapulco to Manila.®

The Europeans used violence stra-
tegically in the early years to gain access
to the lucrative trade of the Indies, but,
like trading companies elsewhere, their
success depended greatly on making
alliances with local rulers and traders, and
especially by paying competitive prices
for the goods they sought. Aside from
early Portuguese battles with the Ottoman
Empire, the greatest military conflicts
were between the different European
powers, which were extensions of con-
flicts in Europe. The outcome of the Seven
Years’ War (1756-63) led to the prohibi-
tion of any further expansion of the French
Company, while the EIC would continue
expanding in India. Meanwhile, four
hard-fought Anglo-Dutch wars between
1652 and 1784 eventually gave the EIC
the upper hand over the VOC. Another
key gain for the EIC was an alliance with
the Mughal Empire that had ruled much
of India since 1526. Initially the Mughals
were the much stronger partner, but over
time the EIC became a key prop support-

ing the Mughal emperor’s authority over
rival Indian rulers.

Older Eurocentric histories portray
the European newcomers as somehow
dominant in the Indian Ocean from an
early date, but that is an exaggeration.
From the beginning, European success
had depended on strategic alliances with
established local players. For example,
the city of Malindi on the Swahili coast
allied with the Portuguese against its larger
rival Mombasa. Similarly the city-state of
Cochin in southwestern India used Portu-
guese help to gain ground over its better
established neighbor, Calicut. The EIC
gradually expanded its territorial control
in India through alliances with one Indian
principality against another. Nor did the
numerous Muslim Arabs suddenly disap-
pear at the first sight of a European ship.
On the Swahili coast they even expanded
their presence at European expense. In the
1600s the sultanate of Oman seized control
of the large island of Zanzibar and took the
important port of Mombasa from the Por-
tuguese, eventually developing Zanzibar as
the world’s greatest producer of cloves.°

Mutually beneficial working relation-
ships with many smaller players were
also essential to the Europeans’ success.
For example, in 1600 the majority of the
population in Hormuz at the mouth of the
Persian Gulf, a nominally Portuguese port,
came from the important Indian trading
region of Gujarat. The large overseas Chi-
nese populations in Indian Ocean trading
centers were also indispensable to making
the system work, despite the Chinese
government’s official disapproval. Thus,
Chinese were eight times as numerous as
Spaniards in the Spanish port of Manila
and something similar was the case in
Dutch Batavia.?°

In satisfying their desire for a share of
the rich trade of the Indian Ocean, Euro-
peans sought bases in the Indian sub-
continent, not only because of its central
location, but also as it was the source of
their most desired commodities. One of
these was the peppercorn produced in
several regions of India. The quantity of

pepper shipped to Europe rose to 7.5 mil-
lion pounds a year by the early eighteenth
century. The many Indian farmers who
cultivated, picked, and sorted the spices
were clearly as essential a component of
the trade as those who transported and
marketed them, even if the farmers’ labors
are less noted in the records.

Indian handwoven cotton textiles also
became a staple of the export trade to
Europe and beyond. For centuries Indi-
ans had been making colorful, washable
cotton textiles for overseas markets as
well as domestic ones. The textile indus-
try required many layers of labor input,
from those who cultivated, picked, and
processed cotton fibers to those who spun
the fibers into thread, those who wove the
thread into cloth, and those who dyed,
printed, or painted the cloths. Europeans
were not the principal foreign market for
textiles, but the quantities they bought
and carried away became substantial. In
the first half of the eighteenth century the
EIC alone was transporting back 800,000
Indian cotton cloths in peak years, and the
VOC was carrying an average of 360,000
a year. Through greater labor inputs and
improvements in technologies, specialists
in the cotton textile industry were able to
increase the volume produced and to earn
income.?!

As important as Indian cotton textiles
became, trade included a wide range of
other commodities from various locations
in the Indian Ocean. As ships loaded with
tea sailed from China to Britain, they
passed by two places that were exporting
the makings of another hot beverage,
coffee, whose consumption was increas-
ing in Europe. The port of Mocha in South
Arabia, which had long been the major
source of coffee beans for Arab and
Turkish markets, soon came to supply
French and EIC traders with beans for
the newly fashionable coffee houses in
Europe. The Dutch went a step further, by
starting coffee plantations that made Java
another major coffee exporter. From the
1600s, the Dutch and other Europeans
also transported more exotic spices than

The Indian
Ocean World

The Indian

Ocean World

pepper from the so-called Spice Islands of
Southeast Asia (now the Maluku Islands).
For the VOC in the mid-eighteenth century
the trade in “fine spices” such as cloves,
nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon was nearly
twice as valuable as that in pepper. 2
While commerce was the principal
driving force behind the massive links
across the Indian Ocean and beyond,
regular voyages also fostered cultural
exchanges. Early on, Hinduism had spread
widely into Southeast Asia. From the
seventh century, Arab traders also had
helped spread Islam around the Indian
Ocean. Catholic missionaries regularly
used Portuguese or Spanish trade ships
to take their religion to new locales. New
converts to Christianity were few in the
Indian Ocean basin, in contrast to Catholic
successes in Japan and China. Even so,
the early missionaries made new connec-
tions with existing Christian communities
in Ethiopia and South India.

Dramatic Transformations in the
1800s

In the nineteenth century the Indian
Ocean was transformed by three dramatic
changes, all of which starred Great Britain.
The first was political: the Mughal Empire
(founded in 1526) and the EIC were
abolished and their territories subsumed

<yramae

3. “Between Kantara and El-Ferdane—The First Vessels through the Canal”
(illustrated Supplement: Appletons’ Journal 18 [July 31, 1869): 4).

into a new India under direct British rule.
The second was the Industrial Revolution
in England, which vastly expanded British
wealth and power, with major conse-
quences for the people of India and other
parts of the Indian Ocean basin. The third
transformation was a massive increase in
the size, speed, and reliability of ocean
transport, which tamed the monsoons and
increased the speed of voyages. Given the
implications of these transformations, it
can be tempting to imagine that they were
part of a grand scheme of empire building,
but in fact these changes largely occurred
for separate and uncoordinated reasons.

In the early 1800s the EIC controlled
territories on the Indian subcontinent that
were larger than all of Western Europe and
contained a population twenty times that
of Great Britain. The Company propped up
its ally, the Mughal emperor, who had little
effective control over the princely states
he supposedly ruled. A rebellion in 1857
persuaded Great Britain to consolidate
and reform this jerry-built empire. The last
traces of Mughal and Company rule were
eliminated. Queen Victoria was proclaimed
empress of India, and her Indian subjects
were guaranteed equal protection of the
law and the freedom to practice their
traditional religions and customs. How-
ever, political power in British India lay in
the hands of an appointed governor-gen-
eral and a new Indian civil service, mostly
graduates of elite British universities.

East of India, in the nineteenth cen-
tury Britain added holdings in Burma and
the Malay Peninsula, including the port of
Singapore. To the southwest, the British
Empire acquired island colonies, including
Mauritius, and the important port of Cape
Town, from the Dutch after the demise of
the VOC in 1799. Thereafter the Dutch
government ruled most of the East Indies
directly, an empire almost comparable in
size to Britain’s Indian Empire.

Another form of official British pres-
ence in the ocean was the Royal Navy,
whose anti-slavery patrols along the east-
ern African coast between 1860 and 1890
intercepted over one thousand vessels

and liberated twelve thousand enslaved
Africans. This slave trade was mostly in
the hands of wealthy Arab merchants, with
Indian merchants from Gujarat supply-
ing important financing. To diminish the
shipping of slaves, the British foreign
office pressed coastal rulers to withdraw
from selling slaves for export, of which
the most important was the 1873 treaty
with the Omani sultan of Zanzibar. Under
pressure to abolish slavery on his planta-
tions and facing other forces, the sultan
sold his mainland African territories, which
became the basis of German East Africa
and British East Africa.13

The reordering of British India’s
economy was as important as the trans-
formation of its political institutions. The
Industrial Revolution underway in Britain
affected India in several ways. By the
period 1870—1913, instead of there being
a large market in Britain for Indian cot-
tons, India had became a major market
for machine-made cotton textiles from
Britain. The industrialization of textile
production in Britain had sudden and
profound impacts on preindustrial spin-
ners, weavers, and dyers in the Indian
subcontinent, just as it did on their coun-
terparts in England. Nevertheless, India’s
total exports increased fivefold during
that period, as the loss of jobs in textile
production was offset by the spread of
commercial agriculture, as Indian-grown
jute, cotton fiber, indigo, and tea found
a growing market in Britain. These neat
tallies of changes in India’s exports overlay
much messier transformations in Indian
society, which are a topic of debate among
historians. 14

British industrialization and imperial
rule also spurred the construction of a
railroad network in British India, which by
1910 was the fourth largest in the world.
The commercial benefit of the train lines
was muted because of the many non-eco-
nomic motives behind their construction:
some were built to move troops to quell
rebellion and others to bring food relief to
famine-prone areas. Even lines that were
commercially viable were often designed

for moving goods to port cities for export
rather than for promoting trade within the
vast subcontinent. Although most lines
were not profitable before 1900, the Brit-
ish who invested in them were protected
against financial loss by government sub-
sidies paid out of taxes on Indians. Some
railroads were of great benefit to Indian
growers because train transport was much
faster and cost much less than using tradi-
tional oxcarts. At first, the social impact of
the new railroads was limited, because the
Indian masses distrusted mixing people

of different castes, religions, and sexes

in passenger cars. After 1900, more and
more Indians rode the trains. +5

Many parties had a hand in bringing
about the third transformation, in ocean
transport. A canal across the 120 miles
of Suez to connect the Mediterranean
and Atlantic to the Red Sea and Indian
Ocean was an old dream that reached
fruition only after the French consul in
Egypt persuaded the Egyptian ruler to
undertake the project. The Suez Canal was
begun in 1859 using a small army of men
with shovels to dig a narrow channel that
was then enlarged with giant mechanical
devices. Britain was at first suspicious of
the project but became enthusiastic as the
canal neared completion in 1869, since
it would shorten a voyage from Europe to
Bombay by half (fig. 3).

Initially most ships had to be towed
because maneuvering through the canal
with sails was difficult. By the 1880s
steam-powered ships could propel them-
selves through it by day and at night using
electric headlights. *®

Private, not public, initiatives had been
behind the development of steamships.
When the EIC lost its royal monopoly over
shipping, private British firms had moved
into the business. Some concentrated
on swifter movement of passengers and
freight to and from Britain, but the most
successful was William Mackinnon’s
British Steam Navigation Company whose
fleet of modern and efficient steamships
provided speedy connections all around
the Indian Ocean region. By the end of the

1800s his company was the largest steam-
ship line operating in the Indian Ocean. A
pious Scottish Presbyterian, Mackinnon
was an ardent opponent of the slave trade
as well as a firm believer in the blessings
that British imperial expansion could bring.
In 1888 he founded the Imperial British
East Africa Company, which received a
royal charter to extend the British Empire
into East Africa. Following a British decla-
ration of a protectorate in 1890 over the
northern territories of Zanzibar, the IBEAC
took over the administration and the con-
struction of railways through British East
Africa (later Kenya) to Uganda.?”

The development of electromag-
netic telegraphy in the 1830s rapidly
led to much quicker communication
over landlines. Once many technological
difficulties had been overcome, British
companies were able to lay an undersea
cable connecting India to Britain in 1870.
Other cables soon crisscrossed the Indian
Ocean. This global “system of electri-
cal nerves” enabled imperial nations to
centralize decision making, eliminating
the need for quick thinking by the aptly
termed “man on the spot.” The telegraph
enabled the India Office in London to
exchange messages with the governor
of India in a single day. Businesses also
benefited from having up-to-date infor-
mation about prices, markets, and events
in distant places. Another benefit of the
telegraph was that ship captains could
communicate with their owners at ports of
call and later by radio waves. +8

The transformations of the nineteenth
century helped usher in the New Imperial-
ism. Though generally condemned today,
when seen in hindsight the expansion of
European empires was both a logical out-
come of the events that precipitated them
and a useful stepping-stone toward the
emergence of modern African and Asian
nationalism. Everywhere, colonial govern-
ments were quite small and dependent on
the implicit consent of those they ruled.
They integrated the Indian Ocean peo-
ples into a global economic system and
created the modern boundaries of such

The Indian
Ocean World

states as India, Indonesia, South Africa,
and Kenya. When their subjects united to
oppose foreign rule, they had the num-
bers, institutions, and languages to gain
independence.?9

The Indian payid Northrup, professor emeritus of history at Boston College,

Ocean World has published widely in African and world history. His publica-
tions include /Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834—
1922 (1995), How English Became the Global Language (2013),
Seven Myths of Africa in World History (2017), and contributions
to The Cambridge World History (2015), The Cambridge World
History of Slavery (2017), and The Oxford Illustrated History of
the World (2019). He is a past president of the World History
Association and currently chairs that organization’s Dissertation
Prize Committee.

1 Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York:
Oxford UP, 2014); Sujit Sivasundaram, “The Indian Ocean,” in
Oceanic Histories, ed. David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit
Sivasundaram (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), 31-61.

2 David O’Connor, “Egypt, 1552-664 BC,” in The Cambridge History
of Africa: Volume 1; From Earliest Times to c. 500 BC, ed. J. Des-
mond Clark (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), 917-18, 935—40; 1 Kings
9:26—28, 10:11-12, 22.

3 Himanshu Prabha Ray, “The Indian Ocean in Antiquity: Whither
Maritime History?,” Topoi: Orient-Occident 10 (2000): 335—52;
George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient
and Early Medieval Times, rev. ed. (Princeton: PUP, 1995), 3-11;
Kenneth Pomeranz and Stephen Topik, The World That Trade Cre-
ated: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present,
2nd ed. (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 16—18.

4 Stewart Gordon, When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants,
Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the “Riches of the East”
(Cambridge: Da Capo, 2008), 57—75.

5 Alpers, Indian Ocean, 40—55.

6 Patricia Risso, Merchants & Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in
the Indian Ocean (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 43—54; Said Hamdun
and Noél King, /bn Battuta in Black Africa (Princeton: Markus Wie-
ner, 1975), 15-25.

7 Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming
Dynasty, 1405—1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007); Glenn
J. Ames, Vasco da Gama: Renaissance Crusader (New York: Pearson
Longman, 2005).

8 Niels Steensgaard, “The Growth and Composition of the Long-Dis-
tance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750,” in
The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early
Modern World, 1350—1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: CUP,
1990), 102—52.

Risso, Merchants & Faith, 86—87.

Wang Gungwu, “Merchants without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning
Communities,” in Tracy, Merchant Empires, 400—21; Pomeranz and
Topik, World That Trade Created, 7—9.

Bishnupriya Gupta, “Competition and Control in the Market for
Textiles: Indian Weavers and the English East India Company in the
Eighteenth Century,” in How India Clothed the World: The World of
South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar
Roy (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 281—305; Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Cot-
ton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent,” in The Spinning World: A
Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200—1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and
Prasannan Parathasarathi (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 17—41; Steens-
gaard, “Growth and Composition,” 126.

Pomeranz and Topik, World That Trade Created, 80—83; Steens-
gaard, “Growth and Composition,” 113-18, 122, 128-31, 148.

Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an
East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770—
1873 (London: James Currey, 1987); W. G. Clarence-Smith, ed.,
The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth
Century (London: Frank Cass, 1989), 10-11.

Prasannan Parthasarathi and lan Wendt, “Decline in Three Keys:
Indian Cotton Manufacturing from the Late Eighteenth Century,” in
Riello and Parthasarathi, Spinning World, 397—407.

Pomeranz and Topik, World That Trade Created, 67—69; Daniel R.
Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Impe-
rialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford UP, 1981),
180-90.

Headrick, 150—56.
Headrick, 172—74.

Headrick, 157—64; Robert Kubicek, “British Expansion, Empire, and
Technological Change,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire:
Volume 3; The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: OUP,
1999), 259-62.

Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World
Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books,
2003), xii—xxix, presents a stimulating balance sheet of the legacies
and issues of imperialism.

= . (b. 1979) is a Mauritian artist based between London
and Mauritius. His multidisciplinary practice of
video, painting, photography, and sculpture employs
archival photographs and artifacts to explore the
social, political, and historical conditions integral
to Mauritian cultural identity and the wider Indian Ocean region. Bayjoo studied at the University of Wales
Institute, Cardiff, and was artist in residence at Whitechapel Gallery, London during 2011. He has exhibited at

Tate Britain and Institute of International Visual Arts, London; the Dakar, Sharjah, and Sydney biennials; and
is a recipient of support from Grants for the Arts, Arts Council of England and a Gasworks Fellowship.

Credits: © 2013-14, 2016-17 Shiraz Bayjoo
All works appear courtesy of Shiraz Bayjoo and Ed Cross Fine Art, London and belong to the artist.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Sea Shanty, 2013
digital video, 2:10 (video still)

Shiraz Bayjoo

Sea Shanty, 2013
digital video, 2:10 (video still)

Shiraz Bayjoo

Sea Shanty, 2013
digital video, 2:10 (video still)

Shiraz Bayjoo

Sea Shanty, 2013
digital video, 2:10 (video still)

Shiraz Bayjoo

Sea Shanty, 2013
digital video, 2:10 (video still)

Shiraz Bayjoo

Extraordinary Quarantines #12, 2014
giclée print, 20 x 20 in.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Extraordinary Quarantines #15, 2014
giclée print, 20 x 20 in.

e wd <= Shiraz Bayjoo

Extraordinary Quarantines #38, 2014
giclée print, 20 x 20 in.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Extraordinary Quarantines #40, 2014
giclée print, 20 x 20 in.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Fig. 7 (Ocean Miniatures series), 2016
acrylic, resin, wood, 6.7 x 4.7 x 1 in.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Aldabra No. 2 (Ocean Miniatures series), 2016
acrylic, resin, wood, 6.7 x 8.9 x 0.6 in.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Ma Coeur 2 (Ocean Miniatures series), 2017
acrylic on board, resin, metal, 6.5 x 4.1 x 2.8 in.

Shiraz Bayjoo

Madagascar (Ocean Miniatures series), 2017
acrylic on board, resin, metal, 9.4 x 6.7 x 6.1 in.

Slavery and Histories of
Unfreedom in the Indian Ocean

Pedro Machado

The societies that ring the Indian Ocean have been indelibly shaped by the move-
ment of thousands of unfree people. A great variety of commodities as well as ideas
moved across the waters of this vast seascape, but so too did enormous numbers of
slaves, unfree, and indentured humans. Indeed, trade in the Indian Ocean cannot be
understood without these forced migrations whose trajectories were complex and mul-
tidirectional, and—in a reminder that the ocean was a global space—reached into the
Atlantic and Pacific worlds. Unfreedom encompassed a wide range of experiences and
statuses, including various forms of obligation, chattel slavery, and debt-bondage, but
also indentured servitude and convict labor that at times were closely connected to one
another.?

This was a sea where the forced migrations of women, men, and children often
resulted in long-distance dislocation from homes in the interiors of mainland and island
Africa, South Asia, and insular Southeast Asia. A sense of this dislocation is conveyed
powerfully by Wangechi Mutu’s Amazing Grace (86—91). The famous eighteenth-century
hymn is widely considered to contain an anti-slavery message. Its author, John Newton
(1725-1807), was a British slave trader in the Atlantic as a young man and later in life
sought redemption, and this led him to compose the piece.

Mutu complicates the famous hymn, rendering it in Kikuyu (Gikiyd, a Kenyan lan-
guage). And its message is no less appropriate for the slave trading world of the Indian
Ocean. For the traffic in humans in the Indian Ocean world, no less than the Atlantic,
rested on violence. It dislocated many thousands, separated parents from children, hus-
bands from wives, and brothers from sisters. It helped to produce the enormously plural
societies that we see across the Indian Ocean world in which Africans, Indians, Arabs,
Europeans, and others are thrown together in a great social mixing.

Conceptualizing Slavery and Unfreedom

For many scholars and readers alike, slavery is overwhelmingly equated with chattel
slavery, in which individuals were bought and sold in markets and owned as property.
This reflects the dominance of the Atlantic plantation complex in understandings of
slavery. These plantations relied upon the labor of vast numbers of Africans to produce
sugar, coffee, cotton, and other commodities in harsh conditions for European and
American consumers. The brutalities of the transatlantic trade in African slaves and the
equally violent rhythms of plantation life throughout the Americas formed the quintes-

sential picture of the structures of slavery
as a commercial enterprise and lived
experience.

This Atlantic model, while key to
understanding the diasporic histories of
African dispersal in the Americas and
Caribbean, is of limited utility when we
turn to the Indian Ocean, for most of the
bodies that were shipped across its waters
were not African. Nor did they labor on
plantations. Rather, slavery and unfree-
dom in the Indian Ocean were far more
complex, their histories much deeper,
and those who were traded and those who
engaged in the trade more varied than
in the Atlantic. Chattel slavery certainly
existed in the Indian Ocean but Africa was
not the only source for these slaves, who
flowed into, as well as out of, that conti-
nent. Overwhelmingly, it was Asians who
were shipped as slaves across the waters
of the Indian Ocean.

Plantations were not the dominant
site of labor organization, and slavery and
unfreedom in the Indian Ocean existed in
social, cultural, and political systems that
defined belonging within hierarchies of
dependency. While mobility was possible,
especially in more “open systems” char-
acterized by porous boundaries between
slavery, kinship systems, and other forms
of labor control, slave and unfree status
established one’s place and consolidated
social and labor obligations to individu-

Slavery and
Histories of
Unfreedom
in the Indian

Ocean

als who served as patrons. In turn, these
patrons were themselves reliant on these
ties to ensure their own place among
peers and dependents.? In the Indian
Ocean, forms of status obligation, bond-
age, and temporary slavery—for example,
for debt—coexisted with forms of hered-
itary slavery. Experiences of slavery were
diverse and were contingent on the specif-
ics of regional and social structures.

No single experience or place can
thus define the myriad forms of unfreedom
that existed throughout the long history
of Indian Ocean slavery, and it is only
by going beyond an Atlantic model that
we can more fully understand its extent,
nature, and dynamics as a key element of
oceanic history.

Routes

Slaves and unfree peoples were
traded for thousands of years in the Indian
Ocean. A lack of sources makes it difficult
to establish the trade’s magnitude, yet
there is little doubt that it was significant.
Slaves from areas throughout northeast
Africa—including today’s Djibouti, Eritrea,
Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan—were
trafficked regularly to ancient Egypt, for
example, and in an anonymous mari-
ner’s guide from the first century CE (the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea) slaves are
listed as one of the commodities traded
along the ocean’s northwest littoral. This
was during one of the peak periods in
the long history of Indian Ocean slaving.?
By the beginning of the ninth century
CE, slaves were also being shipped from
the East African coast south of the Horn
in a trade that was well established and
increasingly drawing in large numbers of
individuals. A sense of the scale of this
trade is suggested by the dense concen-
trations of East Africans on agricultural
estates in southern Mesopotamia where
many of these so-called Zanj slaves
became involved in a large-scale revolt
against the Abbasid caliphate in the 870s
and early 880s that severely weakened
Baghdad and its empire.*

1. Hashim, Malik ‘Ambar, c. 1620, opaque watercolor and
gold on paper, 15.2 x 10.4 in. (Victoria & Albert Museum,
London, IM.21-1925).

Over the following centuries, slavery
and slave trading remained key compo-
nents of Indian Ocean exchange. The rapid
expansion of Islam around the coastline of
the Arabian Sea after the seventh cen-
tury CE inaugurated a second significant
period of slaving from approximately 800
to 1300 and enabled Muslim mercantile
groups to create far-flung commercial net-
works that moved not only commodities
such as Indian textiles—as well as ideas—
but also bonded peoples. These networks
facilitated the transoceanic shipment of
slaves from the Horn and eastern Africa to
the Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf, and
South Asia.°

By the thirteenth century, enslaved
Africans from the highlands of Ethiopia
were found in the Ilyas Shahi sultanate of
Delhi, and the Muslim jurist lbn Battuta
encountered slaves (known as habashi)
working as sailors and soldiers. They also
occupied positions of political authority
and from the late fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries were powerful figures in the
political and military life of India.®

The most prominent was Malik
‘Ambar, born with the Oromo name of
Chapu in the Horn of Africa around 1548
and sold into slavery at the slave market
of Mokha (fig. 1). After a short stay in
Baghdad, he was sold to an important
Ahmadnagar amir in the Deccan where he
became a major military leader and then
himself a political official. He helped to
repel an invasion by Mughal forces and
maintained maritime interests, engag-
ing in Indian Ocean trade. African slaves
played significant political roles in the
Deccan and elsewhere in South Asia for
several decades.’

Slave trading was carried out by
a variety of Muslim, Arab, and Swahili
merchants who transported thousands of
captives to markets in the Arabian Penin-
sula, Gulf, and South and Southeast Asia.
Recent estimates of the magnitude of this
trade places annual exports of African
slaves at around one thousand a year
between 800 and 1700, increasing in the
eighteenth century to four to five thousand
a year, including exports from Madagas-
car.® Overall, and once we include Euro-
pean trafficking discussed below, slave
trading into the Indian Ocean from the Red
Sea, East Africa, and Madagascar may
have involved the shipment of up to 2.6
million slaves between 1401 and 1900.
While this was a fraction of the Atlantic
slave trade, where around 12.5 million
slaves were traded between the fifteenth
and nineteenth centuries, it represents a
significant trafficking in human beings.

The thousands of Africans who were
sent from the shores of East Africa into
the slave trades of the western Indian
Ocean (African slaves did reach more
distant locations such as China and
parts of Southeast Asia but were a small
minority) in most instances had already
traveled long distances to the coast
before they were loaded onto sailing
vessels. They were drawn from the vast
internal slave trades in Africa that fed all
of the continent’s external trades but are

often overlooked in discussions of Indian
Ocean slavery.° Most captives never left
Africa but their capture and trade within
the continent is as much a part of the
global African diaspora as those who were
shipped to Hadhramaut, Oman, Gujarat,
western India, or Sri Lanka. For those who
were taken from the continent, their jour-
ney in the western Indian Ocean was an
extension of natal displacement that had
begun many months—and in some cases
years—before they reached the coast and
the ships that transported them across the
sea. They were already outsiders within
Africa before even reaching the new lands
of the Arabian Peninsula or South Asia.

Africans may have constituted a
minority of slaves traded in the waters of
the Indian Ocean. Indian and Southeast
Asian slaves were trafficked in significant
numbers along regional networks that
shipped slaves over short, medium, and
long distances, across overland and mar-
itime routes. It is difficult to establish the
volume of these trades, however.

That slavery was a common social
status is confirmed by the number of
sources that describe types of slavery and
how someone could become unfree. For
instance, the Shari’a and Sunni Muslim
hadiths recognized particular ways of
recruiting slaves, and Bugi, Malay, Java-
nese, and other texts of Southeast Asian
legal codes discuss the ways in which
someone could enter a state of bond-
age.!° Regional slave trading networks
comprised of Indian, Chinese, and other
Asian merchants shipped unfree peo-
ples between areas of the Bay of Bengal,
insular Southeast Asia, and coastal China.
They were likely well established and a
feature of exchange by at least the ninth
or tenth centuries, and continued to
grow. Their scale, reach, and intensity is
suggested by later sources, for instance
in Dutch materials that show that in the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centu-
ries regional networks in the Indonesian
archipelago were able to secure supplies
of approximately 100,000—150,000

slaves from Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, and
other islands."

The coming of Europeans to the
Indian Ocean after 1498 expanded slavery
and the trade in both Africans and Asians.
In many European settlements, slavery
became a defining feature of social life. It
is estimated that Europeans in the Indian
Ocean alone demanded well over half a
million slaves between 1500 and 1850.?2

Soon after the Portuguese arrived on
the Swahili coast in the 1490s, they began
transporting a few hundred slaves every
year from the area to their settlements in
India, China, and Japan for their labor and
military needs.?° In the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, Portu-
guese slavers expanded their trade in East
African slaves to the islands of the western
Indian Ocean such as Mauritius. Signif-
icant numbers of slaves from the Indian
Ocean trading world were also shipped
to Brazil where they worked in towns and
cities as well as the sugar plantations of
Bahia. Portuguese slave traders even sent
Asian slaves across the Pacific to Mexico
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries.14

The entry of Dutch and later French
traders into the Indian Ocean led to even
greater European involvement in the trade
of unfree peoples. With its commercial
networks that spanned southern and
eastern Africa, India, and Sri Lanka, and
Southeast Asia, the VOC (Vereenigde
Oost-Indische Compagnie or Dutch East
India Company) and private merchants
purchased slaves in a number of areas.
Until the 1660s the Indian subcontinent
was the most important source, with
supplies often related to natural and
manmade disasters such as famine and
drought (the “famine-slave cycle,” a
reminder of the role environmental factors
can play in producing slaves) when sale
into bondage became a mode of survival.
In the late seventeenth century, political
changes in India led the Dutch to turn
to Southeast Asia for their slaves. Wars
and raiding expeditions secured supplies
for many decades. The scale of Dutch

involvement in slavery was reflected inthe Slavery and

more than sixty-six thousand slaves that Histories of
could be found in VOC establishments by

the late seventeenth century. The Dutch Unfreedom

continued to import large numbers of in the Indian
slaves into their establishments in the see

Indian Ocean throughout the eighteenth
century.+®

In sum, direct Dutch involvement
in slave trading throughout the Indian
Ocean may have been responsible for
shipping around one hundred thousand
(and likely more) slaves from the early
seventeenth until the first decade of the
nineteenth century, while Dutch demand
in Batavia (fig. 2) may have resulted in as

2. Andries Beeckman (1628-64), The Castle of Batavia, c. 1661, oil on
canvas, 42.5 x 59.6 in. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-19).

many as two to three hundred thousand
slaves being brought to its shores by local
merchants.!6 Dutch settlements in the
Indian Ocean reflected the Company’s
wide-ranging slave trade. Cape Town, for
instance, contained slaves from India, Sri
Lanka, Java, and other islands of today’s
Indonesia, Melaka, Macao, Madagascar,
the Mascarenes, and Mozambique.?”
French slave trading was a notable
feature of the Indian Ocean world in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Colonization of the Mascarene Islands
of ile de Bourbon (Réunion; 1663) and
the ile de France (Mauritius; 1721) by
the French Compagnie des Indes was

Slavery and
Histories of
Unfreedom
in the Indian

Ocean

the catalyst for the trade, which drew
primarily on captives from South Asia and
Africa. The French needed substantial
numbers of workers for their plantations,
beginning with coffee in Réunion in the
1720s and more significantly sugar in
Mauritius from the 1790s.18 In these
islands the slave population grew from just
under forty thousand in the mid-1760s to
almost 133,000 by the first decade of the
nineteenth century, with slaves providing
critical labor services at port facilities,
and growing foodstuffs needed by naval
squadrons and other vessels sailing in the
region. After the islands came under Brit-
ish control in 1810, a clandestine trade in
captives continued and at least 107,000
enslaved Africans, Malagasy, and South-
east Asians were sold in the Mascarenes
till the British abolition of the trade around
1827 in Mauritius and the early 1830s in
Réunion.?9

British traders conducted a smaller
but nonetheless important trade. Like
other Europeans and Asians active in
South Asia, they exploited periods of hard-
ship, as was the case in 1687 when famine
conditions in Madras (Fort St. George)
led the British to purchase 665 slaves.?°
Madras may for a time have been favored
by English traders in the late seventeenth
century, for a report from a few years
earlier noted that “a great number of slaves
yearly”! were being shipped from there
to unspecified destinations likely mostly
in Southeast Asia. Reflecting the global
nature of Indian Ocean slave trading,
English traders made at least forty voyages
that carried slaves (along with other cargo)
from Madagascar to the Americas between
1675 and 1700.72

Experiences

There was no universal experience of
slavery in the Indian Ocean world. To be a
slave varied from the moment of enslave-
ment, by gender and age, and by the
social and political context in which the
slave lived and worked. As we have seen,
in India slaves served as soldiers in armies.
Central Asian slaves were purchased for

the same purpose. Domestic slavery was
also an important institution and slaves
worked in elite households across India as
washers, cooks, tailors, and wet-nurses;
in some cases, female slaves provided
sexual services, performed as musicians
and dancers, and managed the zenana,
the inner domestic quarters of a house in
which the women of the family lived.?3
Asian merchants used African slaves
on board their vessels as sailors and to
unload cargo. Slaves—African as well as
Asian—worked as intermediaries and
agents for their masters, often being
responsible for organizing the transpor-
tation, sale, and distribution of goods
into interior areas. This was the case for
a twelfth-century Jewish merchant living
in Mangalore in India, Abraham Ben Yiju.
His Indian slave, Bomma, fulfilled a variety
of commercial roles and sailed between
Aden and Egypt on behalf of his master.
Among Europeans, slaves were used
in a wide array of occupations in homes,
fields, gardens, streets, ships, and forts.
In the Dutch case, the majority of slaves
worked as domestic servants in the house-
holds both of Company officials, employ-
ees, and free settlers (“burghers”), and
of Asian subjects residing in areas under
imperial jurisdiction. Slaves worked as
cooks, seamstresses, bakers, and valets,
built roads and canals, and hauled goods
as porters and stevedores at docks and
warehouses. Slaves also grew crops such
as rice, tobacco, and potatoes in Galle
and Colombo in Sri Lanka; worked clove
gardens in Ambon and nutmeg plantations
in Banda in eastern Indonesia; tended to
vineyards in the Cape’s wine farms; toiled
in tin, gold, and other mines in places like
the west coast of Sumatra; and repaired
Dutch East Indiamen in Batavia.*° Slaves
were critical to the edifice of colonial life.
How slaves and unfree peoples
were acquired and adjusted (or were
made to adjust) to bondage—the pro-
cess of enslavement—is, however, often
obscured from view. Yet an occasional
glimpse is available to us from the frag-
ments of slaves’ lives and from narratives

of enslavement that appear in sources.
Many slaves, especially children, were
kidnapped and then sold into slavery. Ari,
a slave prisoner at the Cape castle in 1706
related how “during his childhood years
[in the area] between Surat and Persia,
when he was playing on the beach, he was
carried off by the Dutch and eventually
sold as a slave.”26 Another slave, a young
girl who told her story to a British agent
at Muscat in Oman in 1841, was playing
with two friends in the street in Yadgir in
present-day Karnataka (India) when two
“Arabs” approached the girls with prom-
ises of food and money. After agreeing
to go with them, the “eight or nine years
old” girls were separated before being
thrown into a world of slavery that involved
journeys of great distances and multiple
sales, anot uncommon occurrence. Within
the space of approximately eighteen
months, the young girl was sold six times
as she was trafficked from Hyderabad to
Bombay, then Mukalla in Yemen, Sur and
Masirah in Oman, and finally to Muscat
where she recounted her story.?” Similar
stories characterized the expansion of
slaving in East Africa in the nineteenth
century.28

Capture in battle was another com-
mon route into slavery. Among the Rajputs
of northern India, women captives served
as concubines, dancers, and domestic
servants. In other parts of India, male and
female captives taken in war performed
tasks such as preparing gunpowder in
the arsenals of state-controlled forts and
tending to horse and elephant stables.?? In
Southeast Asia the Dutch defeat of “rebel-
lious” peoples often involved the signing of
treaties with slave clauses whereby a fixed
number of slaves had to be transferred
as boete ofte amende (fine or tribute).°°
Individuals could also enter into servile
status, as has been noted, through sale
during times of hardship, which was what
happened to a ten-year-old girl, “China,”
who was sold by her mother to a VOC
employee at the company’s trading post
at Nagapattinam on India’s Coromandel
Coast. Following three transfers of own-

ership, a journey of thousands of miles
across the western Indian Ocean, and a
change of name, “Rosa” ended up working
on the Groot Constantia wine estate at the
Cape.*!

Although slaves could face great
uncertainty and were subject to the whims
of their owners, the social structures into
which they were incorporated could allow
them to develop nuanced relationships of
kinship and reciprocity with masters, par-
ticularly within the space of the household.
The great regional variation in experiences
of slavery in South Asia, for instance,
included the possibility for household
slaves (especially women) to improve their
status if they had garnered the favor of
their masters or forged close relationships
with powerful individuals. In elite Rajput
households, while the boundaries between
the position of wife and concubine were
ritually observed, some slaves managed
to rise to positions of prominence and
were even able to exert considerable
influence over their masters, as we find in
the eighteenth century with slave-concu-
bine Gulabrai and Vijay Singh of Jodhpur
(1752-93).

That these relationships were possi-
ble and that complex forms of reciprocity
and obligation existed or could develop
between unfree peoples and their masters
should, however, not create an idea, com-
mon in colonial discourse, that slavery in
the Indian Ocean was benign. Often con-
trasted with the well-documented brutal-
ities of Atlantic slavery and the harshness
of slave life in the plantation complexes
of the Caribbean, Brazil, and elsewhere,
slave experiences in the Indian Ocean are
characterized as having been compar-
atively less violent. But the great variety
of unfree and servile statuses across the
ocean, the different social structures,
varying levels of violence and coercion,
and the range of labor arrangements that
existed throughout its vast waters simply
make it impossible to identify a single or
representative slave experience.

Transformations

From the mid- to late eighteenth
century, the nature, scale, and dynamics
of the trafficking of slaves and unfree
peoples in the Indian Ocean were trans-
formed. Under the leadership of the
Busaidi dynasty, the Persian Gulf kingdom
of Oman deepened its involvement in the
western Indian Ocean by conquering the
island of Zanzibar, to where the Omani
capital was shifted in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Omani political expansion was sup-
ported by merchants from the Kachchh
region of western India who financed
clove plantations along the East African
coast that were worked by African slaves
under grueling conditions. The presence
of Kachchhi assets in Zanzibar reoriented
trading routes and established the island
as a leading entrepdt in the western Indian
Ocean and an important node in the global
economy. Equally, growing global demand
for pearls from the Persian Gulf and Red
Sea created additional labor pressures for
divers that were met, in large numbers,
by African slaves exported from Zanzibar
and elsewhere along the coast from the
1870s.%3

At the same time, as discussed earlier,
French-owned coffee and sugar planta-
tions in Réunion and Mauritius provided
a fillip to the growth of the slave trade,
especially in Mozambique and East Africa.
The French continued to import small
numbers of chattel laborers from places
such as India, the Persian Gulf, Comoros,
Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia but they
were vastly outnumbered by the volume
of captives brought to the Mascarenes
from Mozambique and the Swahili coast.*4
These movements shaped the pluralism of
Mauritius that is especially well captured
in the photographic work of Shiraz Bayjoo
(21-24).

Two other factors led to an expansion
in African slave trading in the nineteenth
century. The first was growing demand
in the southern Atlantic for slaves from
the Indian Ocean. Brazilian merchants,
from Bahia and especially Rio de Janeiro,
purchased large numbers of slaves from

Mozambique between the late 1790s and
1811. But the trade took off in the early
nineteenth century after Brazil rapidly
reemerged as a major supplier of sugar—
and later coffee—to world markets. Nearly
150,000 slaves left the shores of Mozam-
bique for Rio in the second and third
decades of the nineteenth century. The
second was political changes in Madagas-
car that led to growing demand for slaves
on that island. These were supplied from
Mozambique and the annual sale of slaves
to Madagascar doubled in the early nine-
teenth century.*°

This growth in the Indian Ocean slave
trade encountered increasing anti-slavery
sentiment and abolitionist pressures from
Europe. The British abolished the slave
trade within its empire in 1806. The British
navy began to patrol in the western Indian
Ocean in the 1810s and 1820s where
it captured slave-carrying dhows and
“liberated” their cargoes, but the British
presence was never large enough to put
a stop to the trade. New markets also
opened up for slaves in the sugar-growing
islands of Nosy Bé and Mayotte (which
the French had acquired in the 1840s), as
well as in Réunion. In the last, the French
introduced the engagé labor system in
1854 to mask the ongoing trade in African
slaves. Slavery had been abolished offi-
cially in the French colonies in 1848. This
resulted in around eight thousand engagés
being imported into Réunion via Mayotte
from Mozambique between 1856 and
1866 alone, while over the second half of
the century a total of approximately fifty
thousand ostensibly liberated East African
and Malagasy slaves and free contractual
laborers were recruited to work on Mayo-
tte, Nosy Bé, and Réunion.*°

Colonial reformers in India, already by
the late eighteenth century, had become
concerned over the trade in children
(proclamations passed in 1789 and
1790 banned slave exports from Bengal
and Madras). In the nineteenth century,
reformers would also focus on stopping
the importation of African slaves into
western India. Yet, because of political

Slavery and
Histories of
Unfreedom
in the Indian

Ocean

Slavery and
Histories of
Unfreedom
in the Indian

Ocean

expediencies, the British were cautious

in their approach to local slave systems.
Even after slavery was “delegalized” in
India in 1843, and criminalized in 1860,
the British were ambivalent and were
often supportive of slaveholders’ property
rights or configured slavery as primarily
caste-based, hereditary, and therefore a
site for non-interference.”

By this time, however, early experi-
ments with indentured labor as a replace-
ment for slaves were successful. This set
the stage for a post-emancipation planta-
tion complex that rested on workers from
the Indian Ocean and beyond. Well before
the large-scale introduction of indentured

laborers into the Caribbean in 1838, sev-
eral thousand Indian and Chinese workers
were brought to the Mascarenes, where
Mauritius served in the mid-1830s as an
important test case for the development
of indenture.* Yet, in the decades that
followed, it was Indians who accounted for
the overwhelming majority of indentured
laborers who were transported throughout
the Indian Ocean and the world.°9

The reasons for the predominance of
Indians begin with the precedent set by
convict transportation by the East India
Company in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries in which tens of
thousands of Indian convicts were shipped
across the Indian Ocean, in part to meet
the demands for labor in British settle-
ments. Convict transportation was one ele-
ment in a “connected imperial repertoire
of repressive coerced labour extraction”
in which the interests of both the British
state and the East India Company inter-
sected as a “means of putting into motion
an alternative unfree labour supply.” Used
for the construction of infrastructure proj-
ects in Singapore, Penang, Arakan, and
elsewhere, as well as for commodity pro-
duction, convicts had been seen for a time
as a replacement for slaves and labored
alongside them and other workers as part
of a much larger workforce.*° Between
1787 when the first Indian convicts

capitalist order. The recruitment of Indians
involved complex arrangements. It utilized
local middlemen who traveled to villages
in search of laborers, while state support
provided other key logistical elements
such as emigrant depots and shipping.
Other forms of contemporary migrant
labor recruitment, especially the kangani
or maistry system that would last well into
the twentieth century (it was utilized also
within India to recruit labor for tea and
other plantations), saw around 1.5 million
migrate to Sri Lanka and Malaya to work
in the coffee and rubber plantations. The
conditions of work for indentured laborers
were often poor, involving long hours and
exploitative circumstances. Many laborers
were caught in a debt trap incurred by
charges by plantation owners for subsis-
tence.

In India the systems of recruitment
connected indenture to slavery, when in
some places laborers were taken on routes
that paralleled those that slaves had trav-
eled in earlier centuries. In South India,
many indentured laborers were drawn
from agricultural slave populations.** And
while indenture nominally rested upon the
freedom of contract, for many laborers
the freedom of the market felt very limited
indeed.

By 1920 when the indentured system
ended, over eight hundred thousand Indi-

3. Indian indentured laborers working on the Uganda Railway, c. 1900

(Gijsbert Oonk, Asians in East Africa: Images, Histories & Portraits [Arkel: SCA ans had been taken across the kala pani

were shipped across the Indian Ocean

Producties, 2004], 33).

4. An Indian family in Natal, c. 1888 (South African History Online, https://
www. sahistory.org.za/article/indenture-new-system-slavery).

and the early twentieth century, around
one hundred thousand individuals may
have been sent to colonial settlements in
Southeast Asia and Mauritius, and, after
the 1857—58 Indian mutiny-rebellion, to
the penal colony in the Andaman Islands.
The connections between convictism and
indenture were further evident in British
officials themselves connecting the two
labor trades, in the language they used to
describe them, and in how Indians often
viewed migration through a prism of incar-
ceration and transportation.*!

Indenture in the Indian Ocean devel-
oped from the mid-nineteenth century as
a form of “free” labor mobilization that
met the needs of a rapidly globalizing

(“black water”) to a variety of destinations.
More than half were shipped to Mauritius
where the influx of Indians transformed
the population of the island; by the begin-
ning of the twentieth century over 75% of
the population was from the subcontinent.
As many as 111,000 indentured labor-
ers went to Réunion between the 1840s
and 1890, and up to 40,000 were taken
to East Africa to construct the Uganda
Railway connecting Mombasa with the
Uganda Protectorate (fig. 3).

However, it was to the sugar plan-
tations of Natal (fig. 4) that the second
largest number (over two hundred thou-
sand) of indentured laborers was taken,
in some cases directly from Mauritius that

operated at times as a sub-imperial node
within the system.’ It was, in part, among
these workers in Natal that a young Indian
barrister from western India, Mohandas K.
Gandhi, forged his political philosophy and
identity.

In South Africa, indentured laborers
joined other Asian and African migrants
in the creation of a working class whose
solidarities would challenge the excesses
of capital in the twentieth century and
forge political alliances in the anti-apart-
heid movement.* While in Mauritius, the
dramatic change to the population as a
result of the large influx of indentured
laborers—so-called passenger Indians
began to arrive on the island from the late
nineteenth century too—gradually mar-
ginalized the long histories of African and
Malagasy migration and settlement that
had preceded indenture. Consequently, in
the twentieth century, there were growing
calls by Afro-Mauritians for greater polit-
ical representation amidst contestations
over identity politics and the “Hinduiza-
tion” of society that contributed to silenc-
ing their voices.*° Elsewhere, indentured
labor migrants and their descendants
have challenged the limits of postcolonial
national identities in the Indian Ocean—
inflected with elements of religious nation-
alism that reached heightened levels in Sri
Lanka as well as in Southeast Asia—that
sought to define exclusionary ideas about
natal belonging.

The movement of thousands of slaves
and unfree peoples across the waterways
of the Indian Ocean over many hundreds
of years has profoundly shaped the societ-
ies that they entered and ultimately—even
though it often entailed struggle—to which
they came to belong. The legacies of these
movements are complex, multifaceted,
and are implicated also in how historical
memory and the retelling of the past can
privilege one version over another, or
indeed be suppressed. Coming to terms
with these pasts requires us to acknowl-
edge their multivalent nature and central-

ity to the emergence of a subaltern and
cosmopolitan Indian Ocean, defying any
single narrative.

Slavery and
Histories of
Unfreedom

in the Indian

Ocean

Slavery and
Histories of
Unfreedom
in the Indian

Ocean

Pedro Machado is associate professor of history at Indiana Uni-
versity, Bloomington. He is the author of several works, including
Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian
Ocean, c. 1750—1850 (2014), “Views from Other Boats: On Ami-
tav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean ‘Worlds,’” American Historical Review
121, no. 5 (Dec. 2016), and most recently co-edited Pearls,
People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (2019).
He is currently at work on a global history of pearl and pear!

shell collection and exchange while also developing research on
eucalyptus and colonial forestry in the Portuguese Empire in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

1 Constraints on space, and the focus of the /ndian Ocean Current
exhibition, mean that | am unable to discuss all of these forms in this
esSay.

2 Markus Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave
Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal
of World History 14, no. 2 (June 2003): 131—77; Andrea Major,
“Unfree Labor in Colonial South Asia,” Oxford Research Encyclope-
dia of Asian History, Apr. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore
/9780190277727.013.360.

3. GwynCampbell, “Introduction: Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree
Labour in the Indian Ocean World,” in The Structure of Slavery in
Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004); Gwyn
Campbell, “Slavery in the Indian Ocean World,” in The Routledge
History of Slavery, ed. Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard (London:
Routledge, 2011), 52-63.

Pier M. Larson, “African Slave Trades in Global Perspective,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Modern African History, ed. John Parker and
Richard Reid (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 67.

5 Edward A. Alpers, “India and Africa,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia
of Asian History, Sept. 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore
/9780190277727.013.26.

6 Alpers, “India and Africa.”

7 Richard M. Eaton provides a useful account of Malik ‘Ambar’s life
in A Social History of the Deccan, 1300—1761: Eight Indian Lives
(Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 105—28.

8 Pier M. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an
Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), table 1.2; Larson,
“African Slave Trades,” table 3.1; Richard B. Allen, “Ending the His-
tory of Silence: Reconstructing European Slave Trading in the Indian
Ocean,” Revista Tempo 23, no. 2 (May—Aug. 2017): 294-313, 296.

Pier M. Larson, “Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and
the Global African Diaspora,” Journal of World History 19, no. 4
(Dec. 2008): 431-64.

Vink, “‘World’s Oldest Trade,’” 150—51.

Vink, 144; Allen, “History of Silence,” 296-97; Hans Hagerdal,
“The Slaves of Timor: Life and Death on the Fringes of Early Colonial
Society,” /tinerario 34, no. 2 (Aug. 2010): 19—44.

Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean,
1500-1850 (Athens: Ohio UP, 2014).

Further details in Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian
Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750—1850 (Cambridge:
CUP, 2014). Allen, “History of Silence,” 297.

Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indi-
ans (New York: Cambridge UP, 2014).

Vink, “‘World’s Oldest Trade,’” table 4.

Allen, European Slave Trading, table 1; Remco Raben, “Cities and
the Slave Trade in Early-Modern Southeast Asia,” in Linking Desti-
nies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History, ed. Peter Boomgaard,
Dick Kooiman, and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV Press,
2008), 135; Allen, “History of Silence,” 296—97.

Nigel Worden, “Indian Ocean Slaves in Cape Town, 1695-1807,”
Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 3 (2016): 389—408.

Machado, Ocean of Trade, 216.

Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in
Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: CUP, 1999); Richard B. Allen, “Sup-
pressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trad-
ing in India and the Western Indian Ocean, 1770—1830,” William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 66, no. 4 (Oct. 2009): 873-94, 888.

Vink, “‘World’s Oldest Trade,’” 143.

Report cited in Basanta Kumar Basu, “Notes on Slave Trade and
Slavery in India during the Early Days of John Company,” Muslim
Review (Calcutta) 4, no. 4 (1930): 22, and quoted in Allen, “History
of Silence,” 298.

Vink, “‘World’s Oldest Trade,’” 143, 146.

Major, “Unfree Labor,” 5.

Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave of MS.H.6,” Subaltern Studies 7 (1993):
159-220 and Jn an Antique Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)
by the same author. See also Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s
Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World
(Cambridge: CUP, 2018).

Vink, “‘World’s Oldest Trade,’” 160—62.

Nigel Worden and Gerald Groenewald, eds., Trials of Slavery:
Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records
of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705-1794
(Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society for the Publication of South
African Historical Documents, 2005), 8, quoted in Worden, “Indian
Ocean Slaves,” 397.

British Parliamentary Papers, Slave Trade, 25, Class A, 401, quoted
in Hideaki Suzuki, “Tracing Their ‘Middle’ Passages: Slave Accounts
from the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean,” in African
Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra
E. Greene, and Martin A. Klein (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), 314-15.

Larson, “Horrid Journeying,” 441 discusses Chilekwa, captured as

a young boy in present-day eastern Zambia in the 1870s. For other
African narratives of enslavement, including the well-known case of
Swema, a Yao girl from northwestern Mozambique, who in 1864 was
given to a creditor as a pawn to cover a debt that her mother could
not repay but who was sold to a passing slave caravan and eventu-
ally loaded onto a slaving dhow at Kilwa that was sailing to Zanzibar,
see Edward A. Alpers, “The Other Middle Passage: The African
Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced
Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christo-
pher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), 20-38.

Sumit Guha, “Slavery, Society, and the State in Western India,
1700-1800,” in Slavery & South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chat-
terjee and Richard M. Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006), 162—
86. The Maratha regime, which had sizeable infantry and cavalry
units in western India, does not seem to have used slaves in military
roles, drawing instead on freelance local and foreign soldiers.

Vink, “‘World’s Oldest Trade,’” 154.

Worden, “Indian Ocean Slaves,” 398.

Major, “Unfree Labor,” 7. Further details are available in Ramya
Sreenivasan, “Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines: Female Slaves

in Rajput Polity, 1500—1850,” in Chatterjee and Eaton, Slavery &
South Asian History, 136-61.

Matthew S. Hopper, S/aves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery Slavery and

in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale UP, 2015). Histories of

Details and references in Machado, Ocean of Trade, 217. See also Unfreedom

Allen, European Slave Trading, 23. in the Indian
Ocean

Further details in Machado, Ocean of Trade.

Sidi Ainouddine, “L’esclavage aux Comores: Son fonctionnement
de la période arabe en 1904,” in Esclavage et abolition dans I’Océan
Indien, 1723—1869, ed. Edmund Maestri (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2002), 102; Richard B. Allen, “Asian Indentured Labor in the 19th
and Early 20th Century Colonial Plantation World,” Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Asian History, Mar. 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093
/acrefore/9780190277727.013.33. Engagé involved slaves entering
into contracts that technically—but not in practice—turned them
into “free” labor, thereby allowing the French in the face of diplo-
matic pressures to claim that they were adhering to anti-slaving
agreements. Engagé labor was officially used until 1864, when the
French finally discontinued it.

Andrea Major, “Enslaving Spaces: Domestic Slavery and the
Spatial, Ideological and Practical Limits of Colonial Control in the
Nineteenth-Century Rajput and Maratha States,” /ndian Economic
& Social History Review 46, no. 3 (2009): 318; and Andrea Major,
Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772—1843 (Liverpool:
LUP, 2012), 8—9. The British did sign treaties with Radama | of
Madagascar in 1817 and 1820 banning exports from the areas of
Madagascar under his control; and in 1822 with Seyyid Said, sultan
of Oman, which prohibited the sale of slaves to Europeans at Zanzi-
bar and throughout Omani possessions along the Swahili coast.

As noted recently, however, the early importation of indentured
Asian labor into Mauritius appears to have been predated by the
arrival into Trinidad of Chinese indentured laborers in 1806 but it
was on a small scale as only two hundred were shipped to the Carib-
bean. See Allen, “Asian Indentured Labor.”

To avoid the idea that indentured labor is reducible to Indian or
Asian labor, it is important to note that Africans were sent also as
indentured laborers to European colonies in the Caribbean in the
nineteenth century.

Clare Anderson, “Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British
Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1789-1866,” in “Free and Unfree Labor
in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (1 700—1850),” ed. Pepijn
Brandon, Niklas Frykman, and Pernille Rage, special issue 27, /nter-
national Review of Social History 64 (Apr. 2019): 205—27, quotes
from 207, 210.

Slavery and
Histories of
Unfreedom
in the Indian

Ocean

The work of Clare Anderson is especially important here, e.g.,
Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to
Mauritius, 1815—53 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); “Convicts and
Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century,”
Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 1 (Mar. 2009): 93-109; and Subal-

tern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World,
1790—1920 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012).

This was suggested by Benedicte Hijejle, “Slavery and Agricultural
Bondage in South India in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandina-

vian Economic History Review 15, nos. 1—2 (1967): 71-126; and
recently developed especially by Allen, e.g., European Slave Trading.
See also Marina Carter, “Slavery and Unfree Labour in the Indian
Ocean,” History Compass 4, no. 5 (2006): 800-813.

David Northrup, /ndentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834—
1922 (Cambridge: CUP, 1995); Allen, “Asian Indentured Labor”;
Alpers, “India and Africa.”

| should caution that the political and intellectual histories of the
relationship between India and South Africa are complex and can-
not be encapsulated by a simple notion of “Afro-Asian” solidarity;
for an exploration of these histories, see, for instance, Jon Soske,
Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in
Twentieth-Century South Africa (Athens: Ohio UP, 2017).

Edward A. Alpers, “Recollecting Africa: Diasporic Memory in the
Indian Ocean World,” in “Africa’s Diaspora,” ed. Judith Byfield,
special issue, African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (Apr. 2000): 83-99,
87. More recently, there have been attempts to redress this margin-
alization of Mauritian Creoles (descendants of the island’s largely
African and Malagasy slave populations) through measures such

as the creation of the Truth and Justice Commission. For a useful
and comparative discussion of the heritage of slavery and nation
building in Mauritius and postapartheid South Africa, see Anne
Eichmann, “The Heritage of Slavery and Nation Building: A Compar-
ison of South Africa and Mauritius,” in Slavery, Memory and Identity:
National Representations and Global Legacies, ed. Douglas Ham-
ilton, Kate Hodgson, and Joel Quirk (London: Pickering & Chatto,
2012), 64—76.

: (b. 1976) lives and works in Mumbai where she studied
sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts from
1992 to 1997. Her work has been exhibited at the
Berlin, Havana, Kochi-Muziris, Liverpool, Sharjah, and
Venice biennials; Kathmandu and Yokohama triennials; Arnolfini—Centre for Contemporary Arts, Bristol;
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art,
New Delhi; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebzek; MoMA, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and

Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains, Lausanne, among others.

All works appear courtesy of Shilpa Gupta and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and
La Habana.

Installation views: Bose Pacia, New York, 2006 (40); Havana Biennial, 2006 (41); OK Offenes Kulturhaus
Oberésterreich, Linz, 2010—11 (42); Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2012 (43, 45)

Photos: Otto Saxinger (42); Anil Rane (43, 45); Ela Bialkowska (47—51)

Shilpa Gupta

Ge ita a i.

Untitled (There Is No Border Here), 2005—06
wall drawing with self-adhesive tape, 118 x 118 in.

Shilpa Gupta

1 MS
ay an

=p EL ae
RED nu rial

Untitled (No hay frontera aqui), 2005—06
wall drawing with self-adhesive tape, 118 x 118 in.

Shilpa Gupta

Speaking Wall, 2009-10
interactive sensor-based sound installation: LCD screen, bricks, headphones, 8:00 interaction loop, 118 x 118 x 118 in.
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar

Shilpa Gupta

Speaking Wall, 2009-10
interactive sensor-based sound installation: LCD screen, bricks, headphones, 8:00 interaction loop, 118 x 118 x 118 in.
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar

Shilpa Gupta

Speaking Wall transcription

Step away one step
Go a bit further away
Go back
Step away one step

Stay
| am the wall in your house
that you are unable to see

You walk past me
and you may never know
You came
You took
You left
| continue to bleed

Step a bit closer

Step a bit closer
Closer
Closer
Closer

Step a bit closer

But you are still unable to see me
And the distance is convenient

Beyond this screen
You really don’t have to know me

One step back
One more

One step forward
Move forward
Ok fine
Now you are no longer stepping on the border
Are you not able to see it?
It is on the ground below you

The wind shifted it by a few cms
One step forward
One step forward

So it’s fine

So | no longer need
Your ID
No longer need to know
Your name
Your religion
Your sex
and the place you come from
Step a bit closer
A bit closer
Is the place you come from
The place you were born
Or the place you grew up
Or the place you inhabit
Virtually
Mentally
Philosophically
Physically
Step away one step
March forward one step
One step

Yes
Now you are on the line
where | last night made the border
But since it is raining today
It’s a bit difficult to see it

Did grand mom come
from your side onto my side
to visit our mother’s grave?

Ah, she must have
Still got the keys to the house

What do | do?

She took the keys
And walked
forward a few cms more
And the rain shifted
the border last night

lam no longer able to enter my house

Shilpa Gupta

Speaking Wall, 2009-10
interactive sensor-based sound installation: LCD screen, bricks, headphones, 8:00 interaction loop, 118 x 118 x 118 in.
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar

Shilpa Gupta

Fenced Borders

Every summer, people over dinner tables across India and
Pakistan spend hours talking and arguing over the taste of mango.

Walking not far, toward the east, stand the alluring mangroves
that have captured the imagination and stories of the islands of the
Sundarbans swamps, stretching like a band through the two coun-
tries of India and Bangladesh, as they dip into the Bay of Bengal.

The acacias of Western Sahara sprawl across the dry sands of
the several lengths of barrier gradually built by Morocco through a
land left in flux after those who came and left.

Olive is the national tree of Palestine and Israel.

Pecan is relished in Mexico and the USA.

The length of thread is in ratio to the length of fences con-
structed on different borders.

Lz—_~-F=SF

Mango Tree 1:7834000, 2013

thread and glue on paper, 14 x 21 in.

private collection

Shilpa Gupta

Mangrove 1:6235011, 2013
thread and glue on paper, 14 x 21 in.
private collection

Shilpa Gupta

Acacia Tree 1:2337358, 2013
thread and glue on paper, 14 x 21 in.
private collection

Shilpa Gupta

Olive Tree 1:1547703, 2013
thread and glue on paper, 14 x 21 in.
private collection

Shilpa Gupta

Pecan Tree 1:3897254, 2013
thread and glue on paper, 14 x 21 in.
private collection

What the Ocean Gives

Kalpana R. Seshadri

That which exists, whatever this might be, coexists
because it exists.
—Jean-Luc Nancy!

Gaia is the name of the Earth seen as a single physi-
ological system, an entity that is alive at least to the
extent that, like other living organisms, its chem-
istry and temperature are self-regulated at a state
favourable for its inhabitants....Gaia is an evolving
system, a system made up from all living things and
their surface environment, the oceans, atmosphere,
and crustal rocks, the two parts tightly coupled and
indivisible. It is an “emergent domain”—a system
that has emerged from the reciprocal evolution of
organisms and their environment over the eons of life
on Earth. In this system, the self-regulation of climate
and chemical composition are entirely automatic.
Self-regulation emerges as the system evolves. No
foresight, planning, or teleology (suggestion of design
or purpose in nature) are involved.

—James Lovelock?

Uncontainable, insuppressible, and unstoppable it
pours over the edge acknowledging no frame as a limit (fig.
1). Within our narrow electromagnetic spectrum, it is of high

1. Ad Reinhardt (1913-67),
Abstract Painting, Blue, 1952, oil

frequency, arriving in short wavelengths. Its essence is to on canvas, 75 x 28 in. (Carnegie
scatter immediately even as it makes appear the sky and Museum of Art, Pittsburgh,
the deep sea—the color blue (110—39). 65.26).

Our planet is blue because more than 70% of the
earth’s surface is covered by ocean waters. Yet, political and ethical environmentalism,
whether expressed through social movements, business practices, or art, as with the
Green Party, Greenpeace, or Green Economy, use the color green to signify their con-
cern and solidarity with earth systems. It can be argued that green serves as a metonym

Us to Think

for environmentalism due to the bias of
environmentalists toward land-based

or terrestrial ecosystems over marine

or aquatic systems and beings. Where
biodiversity is concerned, such bias could
potentially be defended by a simple fac-
toid like the one shared by Sarah Zhang, a
writer for the Atlantic Monthly. “Why,” she
asks, “are there so many more species on
land when the sea is bigger?” Zhang cites
a 1994 article from Science by Robert May
to give the following answer:

One reason May and others
since have suggested is the
physical layout of terrestrial
habitats, which may be both
more fragmented and more
diverse. For example, as Charles
Darwin famously documented

in the Galapagos, islands are
hotbeds for diversification. Over
time, natural selection and even
chance can turn two different
populations of the same species
on two islands into two species.
The ocean is, in contrast, one
big interconnected body of
water, with fewer physical bar-
riers to keep populations apart.
It also doesn’t have as many
temperature extremes that can
drive diversification on land.?

What the

Ocean Gives

The fact that over 91% of marine spe-
cies, according to the US National Ocean
Service,* remain unidentified does not

ern sensibility. Modern critical thought,
on the contrary, discovers difference and
values distinctions rather than uniformity

UstoThink concern Zhang and, given the absence of and oneness. And yet, for conservation-
a tribunal to adjudicate the issue, it need ists and climate scientists, something of
not concern us here either. But, what!I find that ancient One of the waters reappears
interesting is the way that factoid reso- in their reference to “the Ocean” as the
nates with the ancient tradition of referring primeval source of life that sustains the
to the Ocean as the symbol of oneness, living> by maintaining the homeostasis of
union, and the dissolution of difference. the planet’s atmosphere. Though not nec-
For instance, all the major Asian religious essarily theological or eschatological, the
traditions use the idea of diverse rivers contemporary earth systems idea of “the
mingling in the Ocean as a concrete met- Ocean” is also inescapably ontological.
aphor for union with the divine or salva- By that | mean, that it is implicated in our
tion. There is a rich rhetorical irony in the inquiry into Being or existence.
overuse of this image: as a metaphor for For critical thought that is open to the
dying, it is also a dying metaphor, in other perspectives of Gaia or earth systems,
words, a cliché that betokens a premod- evolutionary biology, and climate science,
the Ocean/s can well be con-
————— templated in terms of what the
ge acerca vi philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy
alesis Seeeprereintes theorizes as “being-singular-plu-
= ral.” For Nancy, Heidegger’s
a Be question about the meaning of
Aone being can be understood only
= iF a as originally and constitutively
ancenrove \ MORWECE CzARs a “being-with.” If concern with
te oct \ ME seater reasemm Being is Being, Nancy’s insis-
eA a ron tence falls on the “between,”
paar YS omiane teen -. the mutuality that is implied
we» i: , in “being-with,” because it is
me e)\ Sey Sess “being-with” that affirms the
a ime ‘\ > lmapnl oe, SO shared commons as the precon-
me i or dition of being. He writes: “It is
Ce a, In — : not the case that the ‘with’ is an
ow i \ es 3 addition to some prior Being;
\. “Us jae instead, the ‘with’ is at the
a a De heart of Being. In this respect,
\~ / it is absolutel t
=. Se . ly necessary to
re Near _ reverse the order of philosoph-
dt reseed \ ) ical exposition, for which it has
Ey Goes 4 wet ree been a matter of course that the
| 6 ae cal ‘with’—and the other that goes
wine wae along with it—always comes
Mh ye a “ rs second, even though this suc-
Antarcte 4 - 4 . te .
SS ln ee eee “anak cession is contradicted by the
Ye et _*e underlying [profonde] logic in
—_—, venngey _}WRUSTRALIA question here. Even Heidegger

FN nt ¥

2. Map of the claims made over Antarctic territory, including the Southern Sea region
(ASOC/CIA, https://Awww.asoc.org/advocacy/antarctic-governance).

preserves this order of succes-
sion in a remarkable way.”®

Let me clarify that Nancy’s being-
with alludes primarily to an “other” who is
equally concerned with being. Neverthe-
less, | suggest that by his own logic (which
relies on the topographical metaphor
of the deep [underlying/profonde)), his
between-ness necessarily assumes the
co-existence of the non-human, including
the mineral, the abiotic, or the so-called
inorganic. For, the Ocean is a profound
(deep) Commons, and belonging to Gaia
it co-exists, rather than pre-exists. As
Lovelock says: “Without water there can
be no life; and...without life there would
be no water. Life enabled the Earth to hold
onto its oceans, and they now dominate
its surface. As remarkable as the presence
of water is the fact that ocean salinity
appears never to have exceeded the criti-
cal limit for life.””

Being singular-plural is being with the
Ocean at all times and in all spaces—even
inland, in fact, more urgently when we are
inland: for we are always in a relation with
the Ocean in its/our singular-plurality.

Borders

As this exhibition attests, an ongoing
trend in the social sciences and human-
ities focuses on maritime regions, rather
than nation-states, to grapple with trans-
national exchanges and capitalist global-
ization. The Indian Ocean is one of the
oldest regions for long-distance exchange,
followed by the Atlantic system. The
oceans in their plurality are fundamen-
tally littoral zones—seas, coastlines, and
coastal communities. To contemplate the
Ocean as a correlate of ontology necessi-
tates asking the question: In what sense
do the oceans exist?

The schoolroom wisdom is that there
are five oceans of which the Indian Ocean
is the third largest. It is also the second
deepest on average after the Pacific, and
contains the second deepest trench after
the Marianas. On certain hydrographic
maps it looks like a lake bound by land on
three sides. The boundaries of the oceans,
of course, are not marked by natural for-
mations, but are fixed by the IHO (Interna-

tional Hydrographic Organization, formerly
Bureau). The IHO was established in 1921
by the leading colonial powers of the time,
Britain and France, along with eighteen
other countries with maritime interests.

It describes its objectives in terms of the
coordination of hydrographic activities
worldwide and standardization of nautical
surveys, charts, and other procedures.?®
Where the Indian Ocean is concerned, the
IHO in 1953 included the Southern Sea
within its boundaries. This was subse-
quently altered in 2002 (but has not been
ratified), with the border now at 60°S,
excluding the Southern Sea.° Australia
apparently objects to the redefinition, and
argues to set the border at 67°S. The bor-
der dispute is interesting if only because
it discloses the epistemology of the five
oceans as always already a thought of
property, possession, and power (fig. 2).
To regionalize the Ocean is to historicize
and politicize it, for borders are constitu-
tive of the political.

One does not have to be a sentimen-
talist to associate borders with exclusion,
or view borders, be they checkpoints,
walls, or fences, as an invidious concept
separating and obstructing the circulation
of people and goods. Unsurprisingly, in the
context of nation-states, borders on land,
water, or air, are represented as sites of
war. And yet, the concept of the border as
a limit category is necessary for political
discourse. Conceptually, the border is not
only situated as a spatial limit, it is also at
the center of a community’s identity. Free
market proponents, for instance, oppose
all borders on principle for economic
reasons. Ultimately, it is not the existence
of borders themselves, but how a given
border is drawn, understood, held, and
guarded that is the substance of politics
and history—it is the terrain of articulat-
ing justice and struggle. Thus, however
problematic or contested given theories
of sovereignty and self-sufficiency may
be, the border as a concept nevertheless
enables the prevalence of the “co-” of
co-existence.

Two works in this exhibition engage
the problematic status of borders through
techniques of self-reflexive representation.
Shiraz Bayjoo’s Sea Shanty (16—20) is a
video that was conceived in 2013. The
video in the current exhibition is projected
on a hessian screen, but if each installa-
tion is a unique event, then the elements
of the 2016 installation that used the brick
walls of Fort Adelaide in Port Louis, Mauri-
tius as a screen is worth reflecting upon. In
the film of that installation (fig. 3), a brick
wall is clearly visible and the superimpo-
sition of the Ocean upon brick creates an
unsettling effect.

The doubled representation of the
Port Louis display produces an experi-
ence of migration as a mise en abyme of
contexts, potentially signifying the waters
of the Ocean as colluding with the walls
of separation and oppression. The sailors’
rhythmic work song (the shanty or chan-
tey) that accompanies the video carries an
ambivalent pathos as all work songs do.
The song encourages efficient labor—a
gentler whip administered by the workers
themselves. Bayjoo’s video, by quoting
the Ocean footage in terms of walls upon
walls, situates this and other of his works
within the history of forced migration,
exploitative labor, and colonialism.

Shilpa Gupta’s 2005—06 work Unti-
tled (There Is No Border Here) (40) also
addresses some of the contradictions
inherent in the concept of the border. The
work unambiguously decries “the border”
by signifying the violence of the cut at mul-
tiple levels. First, we see a flag on the wall,
but the flag is made up of words cut out of
yellow police tape used to cordon off crime
scenes printed not with the familiar words
prohibiting entry but with the phrase
“there is no border here.” The text of the
flag speaks of cutting “the sky in half”
and the impossibility of maintaining the
separation because of the drifting clouds
and the common rain. While the shape of
a flag attests to the exclusionary function
of borders, the words of the text speak
of their impossibility and failure. Further-
more, the material substance of the words

What the
Ocean Gives
Us to Think

(the yellow tape that declares there is no
border) ironizes and subverts the function
of separation, thereby suggesting that sep-
arations and borders will invariably undo
themselves. And yet, there are the letters
beyond the texts (meaning itself as only
marks on a page, or cuts on a surface) and
the spaces between the words that silently
claim the originality of difference.

Thus, in their plurality, the five oceans
as spatially bounded categories delineate
the domain of history and politics, i.e., the
contestation or politics of meaning. But, to
think the Ocean in terms of its/our singu-

3. Shiraz Bayjoo (b. 1979), Sea Shanty, installation view at Port Louis, 2016
(https://vimeo.com/185318785).

lar-plurality invokes the ethics of meaning
as first philosophy, i.e., ontology. To cite
Nancy again: “No ethics would be inde-
pendent from an ontology. Only ontology,
in fact, may be ethical in a consistent
manner.”?!°

Complexity/Entanglement

A complex system is an ensemble of
sub-systems, whose dynamic behaviors in
their interactions and interdependencies
produce effects of the whole that cannot
be reduced to a sum of its parts. Scientists
call these effects an “emergence.” Exam-
ples include rain forests, neural networks,
economies, and of course the earth
systems or Gaia herself. For philosophy or
critical thinking, complex systems and the
concept of emergence offer endless the-
oretical possibilities and a profound chal-
lenge to conventional histories of totality

What the
Ocean Gives
Us to Think

as a concept that implies a whole and its
parts, or an entirety that betokens a sover-
eign One. It is not surprising therefore that
the term that philosophers have taken up
to express the implication of the existen-
tial and the systemic is “entanglement.”
Entanglement travels from physics where
it describes quantum states across other
scientific disciplines to critical thinking,
not to serve as an analogy, but to name
the singular-plurality of existential reality.
In her Meeting the Universe Halfway, the
quantum physicist and philosopher Karen
Barad offers a rigorous explanation of

the term “entanglement.” Based on her
reading of the scientist Niels Bohr and the

critical thinker Donna Haraway, she writes:

The primary ontological unity

is not independent objects with
independently determinate
boundaries and properties

but rather what Bohr terms
“phenomena.”...The neolo-
gism “intra-action” signifies

the mutual constitution of
entangled agencies. That is, in
contrast to the usual “interac-
tion,” which assumes that there
are separate individual agencies
that precede their interaction,
the notion of intra-action recog-
nizes that distinct agencies do
not precede, but rather emerge
through, their intra-action. It

is important to note that the
“distinct” agencies are only
distinct in a relational, not an
absolute sense, that is, agen-
cies are only distinct in relation
to their mutual entanglement:
they don’t exist as individual
elements."

When the system is not only phys-
ically complex (like an ice crystal) but
also dynamic and adaptive to stimulus, it
exhibits certain “intra-active” character-
istics that are remarked upon regularly
such as non-linearity, self-organization,
exquisite sensitivity to initial conditions

(the butterfly effect), chaos (unpredict-
ability based on a constant), adapta-

tion (adjusting to feedback loops), and
emergence (where the system produces
effects that exceed the work of its parts).
The Ocean’s singular plurality is readily
evident in the complexity of its physical
systems. As with all aesthetic phenomena,
it exhibits a geo-metry of repetition and
rhythm, a harmony of scale and propor-
tion that generates patterns, symmetries,
regularities, and symbioses.!2 The Ocean
appears to us as Surf-face. We only ever
skim its face. But of course, this geo-metry
is not only a phenomenal appearance, it

is structural as in: the complex “intra-ac-
tions” and symbioses among marine life,
the plankton, algae, microbial life and the
atmosphere; the complex flows of ocean
currents—underwater and on the surface
and the fractal shapes of coastlines; the
ocean winds as they manage the global cli-
mate, weather patterns, and the freshwa-
ter cycle. Complexity or Entanglement is a
condition of Being as the primary “linking”
verb “to be” testifies. Enamored of its surf-
face, and given our minuscule time-scales,
we have long contemplated the Ocean

as an enduring ontological unity. But if

the ineluctability of change implicates

all Being in its negative as becoming,

then the true complexity of the Ocean as

a becoming can only be contemplated

in its complex adaptive behavior—in its
dynamic entanglement. And it is only very
recently that we have thought to think of
the Ocean as a complex becoming.

Becoming

As a phenomenon appearing to
the human eye, the sparkling Ocean is
becoming—i.e., it is inordinately beautiful.
But, what is the Ocean as a becoming? We
do not have to be scientists to consider
the chemistry of the ocean waters and
how it has over four billion years altered
and regulated its levels of salinity and
acid-alkaline balance. Without achieving
this delicate balance, the Ocean could
neither generate nor sustain the condi-
tions for life: for being. Marine ecologists

4. Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972), Botanical Arrangement
Limber, 2011, mixed media collage and paint on Mylar, 51
x 30.5 in.

have drawn our attention to the Ocean’s
adaptive complexity. That is, we know

that this great oceanic body is adapting to
new positive feedback loops as it absorbs
excessive amounts of carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere, thereby lowering the pH
of the water. This has profoundly incal-
culable cascading effects on the entire
planetary ecosystem. The question then is:
What is the Ocean becoming?

Wangechi Mutu is one of Kenya’s
most provocative artists. Her distinctive
collages, installations, and videos of sea
creatures, ovarian tumors, cancer cells,
weeds, nets, snakes, mechanical contrap-
tions proliferate in-between forms that
wind, swirl, and curl around each other.
The collages are convulsive adjacencies
of form, color, shape, and texture. They
are overlays of illustrations culled from a
variety of scientific texts including ethno-
graphic, oceanographic, medical, etc. The

5,.1-3. Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972), video stills from The End of eating
Everything, 2013, animated video (color, sound), 8:10, edition of 6.

experience of viewing her work is one of
inescapable “entanglement,” a confron-
tation with what Donna Haraway playfully
terms tentacular being that marks the
Anthropocene. Tentacular being then is a
homage to the spider Pimoa cthulhu and
its related etymons that inspires her to
rename the Anthropocene as the “Chthu-
lucene.”'3 In this exhibition, the collage /’m
too Misty (92) can be interpreted as a tes-
tament to the “Chthulucene.” It offers one

example of this undeniably
dominant aspect of Wange-
chi Mutu’s work (fig. 4).

In an interview on her
video The End of eating
Everything (figs. 5.1—3),
Mutu explicitly links her
tumor collages with the
state of the earth. It is a
profoundly unsettling and
startling piece of work that
conveys in her own words:
“A planet that had erupted
into all kinds of problems—
that it has blistered and
ulcerated and is pulsing. It’s
alive, but it’s also sick. And
the tumors had vegetation
and blood and women’s legs
and mechanical bits and
pieces. ...They look like a cir-
cular malignant cancer. And
the metaphor is that there is
something about the way we
exist today in our world that
is very much cancerous....
So you look at the environ-
ment and you look at the
way we’ve developed and
what we somehow consider
to be civilization is actually
ruining this beautiful orb.”?4

In an interview with the
author Teju Cole published
in the Guardian she says:
“The ocean is the source
of life. We all come from
there. | think about these
one-celled creatures and |
think about the planet. It is
related to my obsession with biology, even
if it’s only a layperson’s obsession. The
way | visualise what’s at the bottom of the
ocean is very much to do with how | feel
when I’m swimming in the sea.”!5 Mutu’s
preoccupation with complex realities ren-
ders a view of the Indian Ocean as a space
of intricate entanglements where political
and economic history are entwined with
the non-human, invisible, apparently
formless, yet precise forces of the planet.

Mutu’s preoccupation with entanglement What the

and her characterization of the sick orb
may appear more planetary in its vision
and less connected to regional concerns.
Thus, we would be justified in asking what
is the relevance of the planet being “sick,
blistered, and ulcerated” to the Indian
Ocean in particular? Let us consider the
state of the waters:

The topic of sea levels rising has been
in the news for a while, but in 2017, PBS
NewsHour ran a segment titled “Why Is
the Indian Ocean Rising So Rapidly?” The
author Rashmi Shivni writes: “Since 1880,
sea level in the world’s oceans has risen
about nine inches. But one pocket of the
Indian Ocean has puzzled scientists for
the last 40 years. The Arabian Sea and the
Bay of Bengal rose four inches more than
the world’s oceans—a total of 13 inches to
date. The north Indian Ocean is creeping
up its coastlines.”'6 The causes are famil-
iar entanglements: thermal expansion due
to warmer climate-weaker monsoons that
drive heat back into the ocean-melting
polar caps. Over two billion people live in
Indian Ocean countries. It may not be too
early to grieve.

Consider also David Michel’s report
on the rising waters of the Indian Ocean
where he writes in the diction of economics
that the Ocean provides vital “ecosys-
tem services” to the tune of $21 trillion
annually.!” Michel’s larger point however is
that economic complexity can sometimes
overwhelm ecological complexities that
have evolved over millions of years. In the
same report, Michel analyzes the envi-
ronmental pressures on the Indian Ocean
from coastal development. “Domestic
sewage, agricultural runoff, and industrial
effluents dumped in the sea can cause
eutrophication and hypoxia, or act as toxic
substances, killing local flora and fauna.
Eutrophication (blooms of phytoplankton
resulting from the added nutrients in the
effluents) and attendant hypoxia (deple-
tion of oxygen in the water) can engender
effective dead zones in coastal areas,” he
writes. 18

Ocean Gives
Us to Think

What the
Ocean Gives
Us to Think

Holding these observations in mind,
how should we interpret Wangechi Mutu’s
I’m too Misty? Who is the “I”? The viewer,
or the collaged face that is clearly in
distress? Are she/we misty because we are
awash in tears? Too misty to see clearly
until it is too late, way too late?

Tsunami

One of the wonders of the Ocean is
that it is always with itself in its singu-
lar-plurality; it is everywhere always in
place, thus making it a navigable surface
for travel and transportation. In a tsunami,
the Ocean is not traveled upon—rather,
it travels to land. Tsunami: A Japanese
word to say: “harbor wave.” How does
one speak of the Ocean coming in? First
it withdraws, pulls out to a vast distance
disclosing the secrets of its floor—iife’s
remnants revealed and exposed for all to
see, inviting curiosity, exciting delight. And
then, it comes rolling back at the speed of
a jetliner.

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004
was perhaps the deadliest in recorded
history. And it came without warning. We
were all too misty to see clearly that it was

6. Time travel map of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; numbers represent
hours after the initial event (NOAA, https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov
/magazine/tsunami_database/traveltimemap. html).

coming. According to an article published
in National Geographic citing the US Geo-
logical Survey, “it released the energy of
23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs....
By the end of the day more than 150,000
people were dead or missing and millions
more were homeless in 11 countries,
making it perhaps the most destructive
tsunami in history.”?9 The eleven countries
stretched from Africa to Thailand and the
tsunami deluged some small islands in
the Indian Ocean (fig. 6). The small island
nation of the Maldives was particularly
impacted, and holiday resorts, shops,
makeshift dwellings, and the villas of the
rich were destroyed in one fell sweep.

As political animals, we view the
Indian Ocean as an integrated network
due to the historical connections forged
by trade, print culture, forced and volun-
tary migrations, and economic activity
that transcended languages, ethnicities,
religions, and races. As the historian Jerry
Bentley suggests: “Sea and ocean basins
come into clear focus as units of analysis
to the extent that human societies engage
in interactions across bodies of water,
and they become a less useful focus as
societies pursue their interests through
other spaces.”° In other words, the Indian
Ocean as a network, or “world,” is an
accepted and useful epistemological con-
struct only insofar as these interactions
have prevailed. Contemporary frameworks
of globalization, including world systems
theory, and diaspora studies work hard to
legitimize the construct through assiduous
research.”! As a premise of historiography,
ocean basins greatly enlarge our under-
standing of the forces that shape cultural
and political identity. The evolution of
societies and even biological specimens
thereby acquire a spatial logic that had
hitherto been obscure.

If we think of the Indian Ocean net-
work in strictly anthropocentric terms, we
cannot avoid the counterfactual question:
In the absence of human interaction and
human agency, do these zones withdraw
into their original remoteness and isola-
tion? The word “remote” comes from the

Latin remotus, past participle of removere,
to withdraw, or move back.

In atsunami, the Ocean becomes
remote—it withdraws. And when it returns
it integrates and connects disparate poli-
ties. It binds in an embrace that entangles
destinies with shifting tectonic plates as
they bump, collide, and slip under each
other. The collages of the ocean floor are
indeed mysterious—too misty for me.

The Deep Element

To think the Ocean’s depth is already
a “diving into the wreck.” How can we fail
to recall those words of Adrienne Rich?

| go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

| go down.

My flippers cripple me,

| crawl like an insect down the
ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and
then

black | am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of
power

| have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.?2

In 1980, the linguist George Lakoff
and his collaborator Mark Johnson pre-
sented a powerful argument about human
conceptual systems. In Metaphors We
Live By they argued that our perception
and understanding of the world, medi-
ated as these are by concepts, are based
ona logic of metaphor. “Metaphor is not

just a matter of language, that is of mere
words. We shall argue that, on the con-
trary, human thought processes are largely
metaphorical.”23 In other words, concepts
like truth and objectivity make sense only
within metaphorical systems that are
historically and culturally specific. Lakoff
and Johnson study various aspects of the
interaction between metaphor and cog-
nition including what they term “orienta-
tional metaphors.” These are metaphors of
space and pertain to the crucial function
of prepositions (e.g., good is up, bad is
down). According to Lakoff, the preposi-
tions attest to our embodied experience of
time, space, and other subjective affects.
Where understanding itself is concerned,
they observe that we speak of it in terms
of “seeing” as in “I see what you’re saying.
It looks different from my point of view.
What is your outlook on that”*4 and so on.
Truth then is conceptualized as “obscure”
or “hidden.” It depends upon a concept of
depth, having to be “brought to the sur-
face,” and “into the light.” The conceptu-
alization of truth and morality through the
metaphor of depth is evident throughout
the history of Western metaphysics from
Plato to Heidegger. Lakoff and Johnson
suggest that our spatial metaphors derive
from our physical, bodily experience of the
world—something is in or out, in front, or
behind, down, up, or under on the basis of
how we are in our bodies. They stress the
literal stance of our bodies in space and
sensory responses to phenomena; how-
ever, what they do not address or account
for is the world itself. While our metaphors
and our conceptual systems derive from
our embodiment, the experience itself

is given to us in our interaction with the
world, or rather the earth. For instance,
without air we could not conceptualize
the meaning of “in” and “out.” Similarly,
our experience of fire and sunlight are
responsible for our understandings of
light and heat. The earth, its gravitational
force, enables a sense of a “here” and
“there,” up and down, whereas Water,

or more precisely, the Ocean gives us to
think shallows and depth. Quite simply,

our languages possess signs and concepts
to express depth because we/they carry an
archival memory of the Ocean. Because
the Ocean is deep, it gives us to think
“depth,” and in-depth. That the Ocean
gives us to think depth is “deeply” conse-
quential. Without a concept of depth, we
could not conceptualize something called
the truth or morality. Without a concept

of truth, there can be no thought. To cite
Nancy yet again: “No ethics would be
independent from an ontology. Only ontol-
ogy, in fact, may be ethical in a consistent
manner.”25

Ground

Why are we indebted to the Ocean
for thought? Is it because there is noth-
ing deeper than the Ocean? The average
depth of the Ocean is 12,100 feet/2.29
miles/3.6 km. The deepest part of the
Ocean—the Marianas Trench—is about
36,200 feet/6.85 miles/11.03 km. To
get a perspective on this, consider that
Mount Everest measures 29,022 feet/5.49
miles/8.83 km and could fit into the
Marianas with over a mile of water above
to spare. And yet, here is the chemist and
inventor James Lovelock:

If we were to model the Earth by
a globe 30 centimetres in diam-
eter, the average depth of the
sea would be little more than
the thickness of the paper on
which these words are printed,
while the deepest trench would
be represented by a dent of
one-third of a millimeter.7°

Let us contemplate this: The earth’s
crust—its thinnest outermost layer contin-
ues to three miles below the ocean floor.
The distance to the inner core is 3,958
miles/6,371 km. The inner core itself
is 776.714 miles/1,250 km thick. The
deepest we have drilled is 7.5 miles/12 km
(Kola boreholes). These are massive num-
bers to confront and the imposing density
of rock, stone, magma, and iron-nickel
alloy are not easy to think with. In his

limpid meditation Stone: An Ecology of the
Inhuman, Jeffrey Cohen writes: “The love
of stone is often unrequited. An intimacy
of long unfolding fails to be apprehended,
and the story continues in familiar soli-
tudes, human exceptionalism, and lithic
indifference. Withdrawal and remoteness
are inevitable themes with any romance
of stone, since rock outlasts that which
it draws close, that which draws it close,
that to which it is strangely bound.”2” The
stoicism of stone is unlike water. Stone is
an enigma, inscrutable, and impenetrable.
And yet, stone cuts and draws forth blood,
and it calls us, at least some of us. For
those who hear its silent call—the sculp-
tor, the potter, the architect, it yields to
techne, to the work of art, where it shows
itself as what it is not—a thing that speaks.
Hajra Waheed is an installation artist
who spent her early life in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia, the home of Saudi Aramco, the
country’s national petroleum company.
Her art is geological and works with found
objects, stratigraphic illustrations and
maps, and prints. Her preoccupation
with the lithosphere records the voice
of stone—perhaps as a scream. In her
untitled work (152—55) that displays an
infographic map, Waheed testifies to the
atrocity of boring into the earth to extract
the minerals needed for economic growth.
Whether it is below the ocean’s surface, or
deep into the earth’s crust, as fossil fuel
companies drill for oil and gas, fragile eco-
systems are blown into non-existence. The
environmental impacts of deep-sea mining
and offshore drilling are often overshad-
owed by drilling, fracking, and mining on
land. In her Strata 1-24 series (156-81),
that forms a part of an ambitious ongoing
work titled Sea Change, she narrates the
biography of rock as inscribed by time and
collected in the field notes of a protagonist
in search of quartz crystals. Quartz, of
course, is one of the most abundant min-
erals on the planet and it is responsible for
the formation of igneous and sedimentary
rocks. Think granite, sandstone, shale, etc.
As viewers, we gaze at Waheed’s detailed
collages, wandering, wondering—is there

What the
Ocean Gives
Us to Think

Whatthe 3 message, is there a meaning here, a
OceanGives Story, a truth?
: In an interview conducted by the
UstoThink —jyational Gallery of Canada Magazine,
Waheed says: “One always hopes that
one’s practice can reach people and pro-
vide an emotional or affective response,
even if it simply prompts more questions
or elicits lyricism and poetry into one’s
day. In the end, allowing objects to speak
for themselves, allowing histories to infuse
one another and viewers to steep in the
mystery of interconnected clues, creating
just enough tenuousness or uncertainty in
order to leave space for viewers to come
to the work from their own perspectives
and histories—these all remain urgent
bottom lines for me, allowing for possibil-
ity, imagining and reimagining.””® What
does it mean to allow objects to speak for
themselves? Is that the function of art—to
let things speak for themselves? To let
blue run over the edge? Is that why | am
here—to listen to the Ocean speak—as
the Indian Ocean?

Kalpana R. Seshadri is professor of English at Boston College
where she teaches courses in contemporary theory with a focus
on identity and relations of power. She is the author of Desiring
Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (2000), HumAnimal:
Race, Law, Language (2012), and co-editor of The Pre-Occupa-
tion of Postcolonial Studies (2000). Seshadri is presently complet-
ing a book titled Posthuman Economics: Earth, Epistemology, and
Ethics. Her current research interests pertain to complex systems
theory and environmental ethics.

1 = Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson
and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: SUP, 2000), 29.

James Lovelock, Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine
(London: Gaia Books, 1991), 11.

Sarah Zhang, “Why Are There So Many More Species on Land When
the Sea Is Bigger?,” Atlantic Monthly, July 12, 2017, https://www
theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/why-are-there-so-many
-more-species-on-land-than-in-the-sea/533247/.

“How Many Species Live in the Ocean?,” National Ocean Service,
updated June 25, 2018, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean
-species.html.

See Michael Lachmann and Sara Walker’s essay “LifeAlive” for

a discussion of how the laws of physics and information apply to
earth systems. Available in an edited version: Aeon, June 24, 2019,
https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-schrodingers-cat-say-about-3d
-printers-on-mars.

Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 30-31.
Lovelock, Gaia, 44.

For more detailed information, see International Hydrographic Orga-
nization, updated May 8, 2019, http://iho.int/srv1/index. php?option
=com_content&view=article&id=298&ltemid=297&lang=en.

See International Hydrographic Organization, Limits of Oceans

and Seas, 3rd ed. (Monte Carlo: Imp. Monégasque, 1953), http://
iho.int/iho_pubs/standard/S-23/S-23_Ed3_1953_EN.pdf. Also,
International Hydrographic Organization, “The Indian Ocean and Its
Sub-Divisions,” 2002, http://www.iho.int/mtg_docs/com_weg/S
-23WG/S-23WG_Misc/Draft_2002/S-23_Draft_2002_INDIAN
_OCEAN.doc.

10 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 21.

What the
Ocean Gives
Us to Think

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and
the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke UP, 2007),
33.

For a philosophical discussion of geo-metry see Claudia Barrachi,
“Numbers of Earth: The Labor of the Intellect in Nature,” Social
Research 68, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 515—46.

See Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the
Chthulucene (Durham: Duke UP, 2016), esp. 30—57.

Wangechi Mutu, “I’m Interested in How the Eye Can Trick You,” You-
Tube video, 6:27, posted by Design Indaba, Nov. 21, 2014, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo7ISLUQ2GY.

Teju Cole, “Wangechi Mutu: Under the Skin of Africa,” Guardian,
Sept. 25, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014
/sep/25/wangechi-mutu-artist-interview-africa-snakes-mermaids.

Rashmi Shivni, “Why Is the Indian Ocean Rising So Rapidly?,” PBS
NewsHour, Nov. 17, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science
/why-is-the-indian-ocean-rising-so-rapidly.

David Michel, “Environmental Pressures in the Indian Ocean,” chap.
8 in Indian Ocean Rising: Maritime Security and Policy Challenges,
ed. David Michel and Russell Sticklor (Washington, DC: Stimson,
July 2012), 113—29, https://www.stimson.org/content/indian-ocean
-rising-maritime-security-and-policy-challenges.

Michel, 115.

“The Deadliest Tsunami in History?,” National Geographic, Dec. 27,
2004, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/
deadliest-tsunami-in-history/.

Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Histori-
cal Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (Apr. 1999): 217.

See, for instance, Isabel Hofmeyr, “Universalizing the Indian
Ocean,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (May 2010): 721—29 and “The Compli-
cating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method,” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 ( 2012): 584—90.
Also, Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gywn Campbell, eds., Textile
Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian
Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” in Diving into the Wreck:
Poems, 1971—1972 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 22—23.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6.

What the
Ocean Gives
Us to Think

Lakoff and Johnson, 48.
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 21.
Lovelock, Gaia, 79.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 19.

Shannon Moore, “The Intimate and the Infinite: An Interview with
Hajra Waheed,” National Gallery of Canada Magazine, June 5, 2019,
https:/Awww.gallery.ca/magazine/artists/interviews/the-intimate-and
-the-infinite-an-interview-with-hajra-waheed.

7 (b. 1975) was born in Cape Town and works
| in Johannesburg. With the end of apartheid
in 1994, Hlobo began his career in a climate
suffused with a new sense of freedom and
national pride. His commentary on the democratic realities of South Africa and concerns with the changing
international discourse of art remain at the core of his practice. He creates two- and three-dimensional hybrid
objects from ribbon, leather, wood, and rubber detritus; each material holds an association with cultural,
gendered, sexual, or ethnic identity and thus reflects the artist’s own multifaceted self. Exhibitions in 2019
included Unyukelo at the SCAD Museum of Art and Kiss My Genders at the Hayward Gallery, London. In
2020, Hlobo will present a solo exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

All works appear courtesy of Nicholas Hlobo and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.
Installation views: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2014
(64—65); Lehmann Maupin, New York, 2018 (66—74)

Photos: Matthew Hermann (66—74)

Nicholas Hlobo

Ngumgudu nemizano, 2008
rubber inner tube, ribbon, rubber boots, and vinyl, c. 47.2 x 39.4 x 47.2 in.
Collection of Midori Yamamura and Luis H. Francia

Nicholas Hlobo

Ngumgudu nemizano, 2008
rubber inner tube, ribbon, rubber boots, and vinyl, c. 47.2 x 39.4 x 47.2 in.
Collection of Midori Yamamura and Luis H. Francia

Nicholas Hlobo

Amatholana asibhozo, 2017
ribbon and leather on canvas, 8 parts, 19.7 (diam.) x 2.1 in. (each)

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Colonialism’s Afterlives and

Invocations of Oceanic

Sana Aiyar

The ocean, Shiraz Bayjoo, suggests, is “not a space of separation but connection.”!
The Indian Ocean is no exception. Its waters have been a muse for artists and schol-
ars who have invoked connections across space and time to interrogate the making of
borders, and the messy entanglement of human mobility with nationalist projects of
expulsion. Colonialism’s afterlife in the Indian Ocean world—territorial nationalism—has
produced a politics of belonging and exclusion through its deployment of the categories
of the “mobile” (transient) migrant and “indigenous” (always-present) citizen. National
belonging, in this framework, is contingent on shifting registers of race, ethnicity, and
religion.

Shiraz Bayjoo and Shilpa Gupta reject the territorial rootedness of contemporary
nation-states posited on such claims of racial and religious separation and distinction.
They turn their gaze outward across the many horizons of oceanic history to repudiate
the nationalist conflation of people and their histories with singular, territorial, national-
ized spaces. Bayjoo and Gupta draw attention to the artificiality and tyranny of carceral
national borders and conceptualize mobility as a form of everyday resistance and resil-
ience. In so doing, they bring into relief the mundane acts of worship, eating, and falling
in love that subvert territorial boundaries and connect—rather than separate—spaces
and people across the Indian Ocean. Bayjoo’s and Gupta’s works in /ndian Ocean Cur-
rent: Six Artistic Narratives explore many concerns taken up in the growing field of Indian
Ocean historiography that, over the last decade, has remapped South Asia and Africa
to recover shared histories that have been marginalized in nationalist framings. | turn to
some of these in this essay.

Empire, Capital, and Labor around the Indian Ocean

When Vasco da Gama sailed from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in 1497-98, he
passed the southern tip of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and moved north
up the eastern coast of the continent, dropping anchor in present-day Mozambique,
Mombasa, and Malindi before arriving in Calicut on the western coast of India. In eastern
Africa, he met merchants from India who had long been plying dhows across the Indian
Ocean. These traders survived several centuries of European attempts to establish oce-
anic and territorial sovereignty under the guise of colonialism (fig. 1).

While the Portuguese militarized trade across the Indian Ocean, fortifying ports
such as Mombasa and Goa, Afro-Asian economic, political, and social networks not only
continued but scaled up in size and scope. Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi merchants from

History

1. Dhow under sail off the Kenyan coast, c. 1950s—60s (Winterton Collection
of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies,
Northwestern University, Evanston, 36-1-39).

the western coast of India, many from
present-day Gujarat, collaborated with
and circumvented Portuguese attempts to
establish hegemony in the Indian Ocean.?
Politically, the Portuguese in eastern
Africa were challenged by an expanding
Arab-Omani state from the late seven-
teenth century onward and the migration
of Omanis to Zanzibar, which became a
cosmopolitan center of culture, trade,
and politics over the course of the next

Colonialism’s
Afterlives
and
Invocations
of Oceanic

History

century and attracted capital and goods
from India. A thriving trade in cotton cloth,
ivory, and slaves intimately connected

the economies of the littoral realms of the
eastern and western Indian Ocean, an
entanglement that reverberated deep into
the western Indian and East African hin-
terlands even as the Portuguese, Dutch,
French, and the English challenged, and
ultimately defeated, territorial empires
and chiefdoms in Africa and Asia. As
historians Jeremy Prestholdt and Pedro
Machado have shown, far from being a
reserve of Europeans, “modernity,” in the
tangible form of capital, consumption,
commodities, and cosmopolitanism, was
produced by African and South Asian
traders and consumers in the interregional
Indian Ocean world from the mid-eigh-
teenth century onward.?

European empire building changed
the economic, political, and social flows
of these oceanic currents. By arming their
ships in the late fifteenth century, the
Portuguese militarized the Indian Ocean
world; by establishing an empire over
which the sun never set in the nineteenth
century, the British colonized the Indian
Ocean world. European modernity brought
within its purview oceanic trade and terri-
torial expansion, replacing, in the process,
the cosmopolitanism of littoral polities and
societies with singular notions of political
sovereignty. This, in turn, brought with it
racial hierarchies that categorized people
and communities along a civilizational
ladder of “progress.” From western to
eastern Africa, across islands in the Atlan-
tic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, the British
steadily expanded their territorial reach.
With every new colony a dizzying array of
communities were turned into imperial
subjects who were fitted into discrete
colonial racial categories.

Moreover, in every colony annexed to
the empire, a new commodity was culti-
vated that secured Britain’s economic and
political dominance in the world. During
the high noon of colonialism, from the
mid-nineteenth century to the First World
War, India, the jewel in the crown, pro-

duced opium, tea, and other agricultural
goods to fuel Britain’s industrialization,
becoming, along the way, the market for
the metropole’s manufactured goods.
British Guiana, Mauritius, Trinidad, and
Fiji came with sugar plantations while

East Africa provided cloves and coffee.
The profitability of South Africa’s coal,
diamond, and gold mines was replicated in
Burma’s rice-growing lower delta, Mala-
ya’s rubber plantations, and Ceylon’s teas
and spices. The exploitation of nature’s
bounty required the development of
export-oriented cash crops and infrastruc-
ture that connected the hinterland to the
ports.

The keys to success in this British
colonial economy that came to dominate
the Indian Ocean were capital and labor.
India supplied both. Empire scaled up
mobility across the Indian Ocean and
close to twenty-nine million sojourners
and migrants from India circulated across
these waters between 1830 and 1930. As
historian Sugata Bose has noted, for the
British Empire and its colonial subjects,
the Indian Ocean had a hundred horizons.*

In 1497—98 Vasco da Gama had
relied on a merchant from India to sail
from Malindi to Calicut. Europeans
continued to extract local knowledge and
resources well after the “age of discovery.”
Despite their cartographical and techno-
logical prowess in the nineteenth century,
by which time the Indian Ocean had been
turned into a “British Lake,” the British
found themselves completely dependent
on the material and political capital of
merchants from India to make inroads into
East Africa and Burma.$ Rajat Kanta Ray
and Sugata Bose have described these
traders as “intermediary capitalists” who
operated at three overlapping levels as
investors, exporters, and middlemen. As
bankers and moneylenders, they provided
credit to both European empire builders
and local cultivators entering the cash
crop economy.® The lower delta in Burma,
for example, became the largest producer
of rice in the world by the late nineteenth
century due to the capital provided by

Chettiar bankers, a community of entre-
preneurs from southern India. In eastern
Africa, Gujarati petty shopkeepers linked
the informal bazaars and trading centers
in the hinterland to the colonial economy
with their willingness to engage in barter
and trade in currency, providing coins

for local Africans to pay taxes. Larger
scale shopkeepers and traders stocked
their shops in colonial towns with goods
acquired on consignment from merchants
who imported and exported agricultural
and manufactured goods from the ports of
Bombay, Mombasa, and Rangoon. Ports
and railways that brought the interior
closer to the coast developed at a rapid
pace, and as the British taxpayer began
to complain about the costs of empire,
these intermediary merchants stepped
up to provide capital for infrastructure
projects such as the building of the East
Africa railways. Despite the loss of political
sovereignty, the colonization of the Indian
Ocean created unrivaled opportunities for
merchants and traders from British India
to reap profits from overseas ventures to
their east and west. Kenya and Burma, in
particular, were considered the “America
of the Hindu,” as Gujarati and Chettiar
capitalists became complicit and willing
partners in the spread of British rule in
these colonies where they positioned
themselves as “sub-imperialists.””

Capital alone did not ensure the
development of the colonial economy in
the Indian Ocean, nor its profitability. The
sugar, rice, tea, and rubber plantations as
well as the mines, railways, and ports were
built on the backs of laborers. The lucra-
tive sugar plantations in Mauritius, among
other locations, were entangled in the dark
web of slavery in the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans. In 1833, Britain banned slavery,
equating modernity with civilization, and
civilization with freedom and equality. The
economic profitability of its colonial enter-
prise, however, depended on the availabil-
ity of cheap, but now free, labor. Having
distanced themselves from the “uncivi-
lized” procurement of labor through slav-
ery, the British colonial state introduced

a new system of labor within and beyond
the Indian Ocean—that of indenture.® The
availability of large numbers of landless
Indians solved the colonial conundrum of
ensuring Britain’s overseas expansion as
not only a profitable enterprise but also a
civilizing mission that promised freedom
and equality for the colonized. Rather than
coercing and enslaving humans, indenture
was cast as a voluntary, legally bound
system of labor recruitment that provided
wages for a fixed number of years. Its
advocates also claimed that indenture
served to “civilize” both the laborers them-
selves who were otherwise landless—and
therefore suspect—and indigenous pop-
ulations in the colonies whose labor was
either unavailable or unaffordable.

In 1838, the first ships carrying inden-
tured laborers from India left for Mauritius.
By 1911, close to 1.3 million laborers,
some of whom were returning emigrants,
affixed their thumb impressions to labor
agreements that were illegible and often
incomprehensible to them, boarded ships
in Calcutta and Madras, and sailed to Fiji,
Mauritius (fig. 2), Guiana, Trinidad, Natal,
and Kenya.

A larger number, close to twenty-eight
million, the majority of whom were uncon-
tracted seasonal laborers, traveled shorter
distances across the Bay of Bengal, to
Malaya, Ceylon, and Burma.’ Although
slave labor was outlawed across the
British Empire, the institutions of slavery,
particularly the ships that treated slaves
as cargo and the plantations themselves—
complete with overseers who determined
the payment and, in many cases, the
non-payment of wages, the quantity of
work, and meted out violent punishment—
were not dismantled. Deception, coercion,
and desertion took on a new legality that
bound indentured laborers to plantations,
quite literally, while uncontracted laborers
circulating in the Bay of Bengal were left
entirely to the mercy of their recruiters and
employers who operated with absolutely
no state oversight. Contemporary critics in
Britain and India, the laborers themselves,
and later-day historians have argued that

indenture was a “new system of slavery.”
The transience of “free” labor in Malaya,
Ceylon, and Burma empowered recruiters
and employers to provide no housing or
rations, leaving large numbers impover-
ished and in debt in conditions that were
arguably even worse than those who were
indentured. Free or indentured, migrant
laborers from India in colonies across

the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans
were entangled in the colonial project,
producing commodities and building the
infrastructure that consolidated British
rule across the world. Although we asso-
ciate the violence of colonialism with the
spectacle of the wars of conquest of the
nineteenth century and the counter-insur-
gencies of the twentieth century, it was
the violence of everyday life on the planta-
tions, which has been captured so evoca-
tively by Gaiutra Bahadur and others, that
embodied the racial, gendered, and class-
based tensions of European modernity. '°

Colonialism’s Afterlives

Religion and Resilience

While “slavery” has been a recur-
ring trope in descriptions of indentured
labor and underscores the human cost of
European modernity and its imperial and
capital expansion, the Indian Ocean has
provided historians and artists a horizon
from which to recover the agency and
humanity of the colonized. For Shiraz
Bayjoo, this is a project “of recouping an
individual and collective identity beyond
colonial narratives.”!! He locates the
“lateral connections” across the Indian
Ocean that enable such a recovery in
Mauritius, his homeland and the site of
his work. In a series of photographs titled
Extraordinary Quarantines, he invokes a
history of the everyday acts of resistance
and the resilience of African slaves and
indentured laborers from India who were
settled in Mauritius by the French and
the English. Bayjoo’s work borrows its
title from a former British governor who
described Mauritius to Mark Twain as “a
land of extraordinary quarantine”—an

island where English ships were forced Colonialism’s

into quarantine by the French colonial
government, and a place with a “very
small; small to insignificance” population nd

Afterlives

of “East Indian[s]”, “mongrels,” “negroes,” —|nyocations
“French,” and “English.” It was a place ;
where one could find “all kinds of mix- of Oceanic
tures” and “every shade of complexion.” —_ History

While the ships that were quarantined
were allowed to leave after a mandated

2. “Hill Coolies Landing at the Mauritius” (///ustrated London News 13 [Aug. 6,
1842]: 193).

twenty days, Bayjoo’s work draws atten-
tion to those who were in permanent
quarantine on the island. The historical
and sacred geography of his homeland

is evocatively captured in this series of
photographs. Extraordinary Quarantines
#38 (23) is an image of the Indian Ocean,
of waves crashing against the rocks,
emphasizing the centrality of the ocean to
the history of the island that was settled
by waves of migrants—French, African,
English, and Indian. The gray image of an
opulent grave in Extraordinary Quarantines
#40 (24) contrasts with the vividly colored,
modest graves in Extraordinary Quaran-
tines #12 (21), a juxtaposition deployed
to remind us of the colonial state and the
unnamed slave and indentured labor on
which it was built. It is in Extraordinary
Quarantines #15 (22) ina photograph of a
large Hindu deity, Hanuman, that Bayjoo

Colonialism’s
Afterlives
and
Invocations
of Oceanic

History

celebrates the resistance and resilience
of the indentured laborers whose descen-
dants constitute the majority of the pop-
ulation of Mauritius today. Colonialism’s
afterlife in Mauritius, in Bayjoo’s framing,
is its plural cultural inheritance that is
inseparable from oceanic history. The
permanently quarantined African, Indian,
and Creole laborers for whom Mauritius
became home, some by force, others by
fate, together created a cosmopolitan
island nation defined by its inhabitants’
“ancestral cultures.”!5

Hanuman, in Bayjoo’s photograph, is
a large, imposing statue dressed in red,
towering toward the sky—the iconic Hindu
deity carrying a mountain in the palm of
his left hand. The location of this statue is
Grand Bassin Lake in the mountains about
1,800 feet above sea level. Referred to as
“Ganga Talao” in a direct invocation of the
Ganges, the most sacred river in India for
Hindus, Grand Bassin is the most “pres-
tigious Hindu sacred place in Mauritius,”
and, indeed, the Indian Ocean world
outside of South Asia.'4 Over four hun-
dred thousand pilgrims, the majority from
Mauritius itself, visit Ganga Talao every
year in February to celebrate Shivratri,
a popular Hindu festival. A number of
Hindu temples surround the lake, mirror-
ing temple complexes in northern India.
Since the early twentieth century, Ganga
Talao has been managed by a number of
voluntary Hindu associations with links to
similar organizations in India such as the
Hindu Mahasabha and the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (World Hindu Council). The
Indian government has also been involved
in maintaining and expanding Ganga Talao
since the 1970s, acknowledging its emo-
tive and connective centrality to the large
Hindu diaspora in Mauritius. In 1972,
“holy water” from the Ganges was flown to
Ganga Talao in a special vessel to legiti-
mize the diasporic origin myth that located
the Ganges as the lake’s source. Mathieu
Claveyrolas argues that this marked the
“ritual transfer of Hindu territory and iden-
tity” from the Indian homeland, conferring

upon Ganga Talao the status of a “sacred
place” within an oceanic Hindu world.

Almost a century earlier, in 1898,
a group of Hindu pilgrims led by Pandit
Giri Gossayne had walked to Ganga Talao
following the pandit’s dream that in the
land of extraordinary quarantine, there
existed a sacred lake whose waters flowed
directly from the Ganges.?® Within the next
two decades, Grand Bassin became the
site of annual pilgrimage for increasingly
large numbers of Hindu worshipers. What
appears to be a mundane site of wor-
ship in Bayjoo’s work is in fact a symbol
of resistance. The majority of the Hindu
population in Mauritius consisted of inden-
tured laborers until the system came to an
end during the First World War. Although
nominally free, in contrast to the slave
labor whose jobs they now performed,
their movement was severely restricted.
The annual pilgrimage to Ganga Talao
was simultaneously an escape from the
plantation, the realization of their dreams
of “return” to their homeland, and the
making of a diasporic enclave and iden-
tity that allowed indentured laborers and
their descendants to rebuild in Mauritius
all that they had lost by boarding ships in
Calcutta and Madras.”

Religion offered labor migrants
ties that bound diasporic communities
together, providing a sacred and commu-
nal space for resistance. At the same time,
anticolonial nationalists in India built up a
campaign against the system of indenture
itself, especially after the return to India
of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had spent
close to two decades in South Africa.?®
While the plantation economies of British
Guiana, Trinidad, Fiji, and Mauritius came
under fire for the mistreatment of inden-
tured laborers, immigration restrictions on
merchants and traders from India in white
settler colonies such as Kenya and South
Africa further emboldened nationalists to
criticize the racist discourse that posi-
tioned Indians as inferior and less civilized
than Europeans.’ Indenture ended with
the outbreak of the First World War, and
Indian nationalists turned their attention

to attaining independence from the Brit-
ish. The depression of 1929-30 created

a glut in labor markets across the Indian
Ocean, slowing the rate of emigration from
India.

Race and Resistance

The legacy of indenture continues in
Guiana, Mauritius, Fiji, and Trinidad where
“Indians” form a majority or close to a
majority of the population, living in dias-
poric enclaves that simultaneously include
and exclude. Colonialism’s afterlives—the
racial and religious borders built by Indi-
ans in these postcolonial nations—have
been interrogated in the literature of V. S.
Naipaul and scholarship of Anjali Prabhu
and others who expose the limits of dias-
poric imaginations.2° While Mauritius has
attempted to reconcile the racial trappings
of its Indian, African, and Creole popula-
tion by embracing “ancestral culture” in
defining its nationhood at the moment of
decolonization, a different fate met Indian
migrants in settler colonies.

Merchants and traders from India
acted as sub-imperialists in the early days
of colonial rule in eastern Africa at the turn
of the century. European settlers in Kenya
and South Africa, however, wanted to con-
vert these areas into “white man’s coun-
try,” similar to settler colonies in Australia,
New Zealand, and North America. Pointing
to India’s own colonial subjugation, Euro-
peans argued that Indians were a racially
distinct group, below Europeans in the
civilizational hierarchy and not equal nor
effective partners in the imperial project.
By the early 1910s, they began to argue
that far from being a civilizing influence,
the Indian presence in East Africa was
detrimental to the indigenous population
who, in their telling, needed to be Chris-
tianized—and thereby civilized—to fulfill
Britain’s imperial vision. In response, led
by Gandhi in South Africa and a number of
Muslim merchants in East Africa, mid-
dle- and upper-class migrants distanced
themselves from indentured laborers and
demanded parity with European settlers
based on Indian civilizational achieve-

ments that they carried with them across
the Indian Ocean to Africa. Just as Hindu
migrants in Mauritius established a sacred
connection with the Ganges, merchants
and traders invoked the ancient com-
mercial and political glory of their Indian
homeland to argue for political and
economic equality with Europeans in
East Africa, a land they claimed to have
“developed” for decades before Europe-
ans arrived on the scene.?!

The civilizational claims made by
these merchants, who assumed the lead-
ership of diasporic Indian communities in
South and East Africa in the early twen-
tieth century, marked them as distinct
from, and more “modern” than, Africans.22
At the same time, building on these trade
networks, petty shopkeepers established
small shops selling everyday goods to Afri-
cans and bought their agricultural produce
(fig. 3).

African shopkeepers, dependent on
the colonial state for capital, could not
compete with the Indians who turned to
larger merchants for loans and merchan-
dise. At the same time, the colonial gov-
ernment in East Africa employed skilled
and semi-skilled Indian laborers in their
many infrastructure projects, while African
labor was employed only in unskilled work
that paid much less. This pattern of com-
merce and wage labor created diasporic
economic monopolies and enclaves that
were, in effect, racial borders that Africans
could not cross. By the interwar years,
as unskilled African labor organized into
unions and anticolonial resistance mobi-
lized into mass movements of elite nation-
alism and subaltern revolution, Indians
became the target of a cry to make “Africa
for Africans.” Everyday skirmishes in the
overcrowded and underdeveloped non-Eu-
ropean areas of colonial cities took on an
increasingly racialized framing as clashes
between Indian shopkeepers and their
African customers and accidents involving
Indian car owners and African pedestrians
escalated into violent affrays and melees.?5

On the other side of the Indian Ocean
a discourse of indigeneity emerged in

Burma where more than thirteen million
seasonal migrants from India cycled
through between 1840 and 1930.7 From
the mid-nineteenth century onward, the
British had gradually annexed different
regions of Burma and attached them,
administratively, to British India. Capital
and labor crossed the Bay of Bengal into
the Arakan and Rangoon. The latter was
the busiest port of immigration in the
world at the time, rivaling New York.?5
Indian migrants constituted the majority
of the population of Rangoon, while an
already large, Bengali-speaking Muslim
community in the Arakan increased in
number with the now-closer administra-
tive association of Burma with Bengal
and India (fig. 4). The 1930s opened
and closed with the outbreak of violence
in Rangoon and the lower delta against
Indian labor accompanied by a rising
discourse of nationalism. Arguing for the
separation of Burma from India as the
first step toward independence, Burmese
nationalists deployed the language of
race and religion to distinguish Burmans
from Indians. They imagined their nation
as Buddhist and Burmanese, rendering
migrants from India permanent outsid-
ers.76

In East Africa and Burma, the spec-
ter of the migrant was used to define the

nation racially as one in which Indians were
unwanted guests. Space and race mapped

together at the moment of decolonization,
and within the first few years of indepen-
dence the euphoria of freedom gave way
to disillusionment as it became clear that
colonialism’s afterlives had yielded inde-
pendent states but had not eliminated the
structural inequalities of empire.
In Kenya and Uganda, Indians were

singled out as colonial hangovers who were

preventing “real” citizens from gainful
employment and economic progress.
Unlike Mauritius’s embrace of the plu-
ralism of its colonial-born citizens, East
African nationalists ignored the long his-
tory of migration in the Indian Ocean that
predated colonial rule and deployed the
recurring trope of the Indian migrant as an

. . . . 1 1 U
anachronistic presence in the nation who _—Colonialism’s

was unwanted, unwelcome, and complicit
in the colonial subjugation of Africans.
The postcolonial state in Kenya moved to nd

Afterlives

squeeze shopkeepers out of the country, Invocations
while in Uganda Idi Amin issued an expul- ;
sion order shortly after his military coup in _°f Oceanic
1971 giving Indians ninety days to leave History

the country. In Uganda, especially, this
expulsion was carried out by the military
amidst the threat of real and perceived
violence.

4. Mogul Shia Masjid (built 1914-18), 91 30th Street,
formerly known as Mogul Street, Rangoon (author’s
photo).

Colonialism’s
Afterlives
and
Invocations
of Oceanic

History

Race, Religion, and Remapping the
Nation

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw
the voluntary and involuntary exodus of
Indians from East Africa. Some returned
to India, but the majority became twice
migrants in Britain, bringing the empire,
quite literally, home to the metropole.?”

In Burma, a 1962 expulsion order
pushed the small remaining Indian com-

5. Rohingya refugees prevented from entering camps by Bangladeshi border
guard, Oct. 2017 (Dar Yasin/Associated Press).

munity out of the country. Two decades
later, the Muslim, Bengali-speaking com-
munity in the Arakan, the Rohingya, were
rendered stateless as they were excluded
from the list of citizens in the constitution
of Myanmar in 1982. The government of
Myanmar insists on referring to them as
Bengali, not Rohingya. This nomenclature
allows them to argue that the Rohingya
are Bangladeshi migrants, illegally liv-

ing in Myanmar (fig. 5). In what the UN
has called a military-backed campaign

of “ethnic cleansing,” more than half a
million have left their homeland to which
they make a claim going back three to
four generations. The Rohingyas’ claims
of territorial belonging, and the Myanmar
government’s disavowal of the same, have
underscored a deeply entangled crisis of
mobility, migration, identity, and national-
ism involving Myanmar, Bangladesh, India,
and Pakistan.

While decolonization in eastern Africa
and Burma was accompanied by the mak-
ing of racial boundaries within national ter-
ritories that marked certain groups as not
belonging, colonialism’s afterlives in South
Asia are deeply entangled with the many
cartographical experiments of the British
in the region and the making of religious
boundaries by postcolonial nationalists
(figs. 6-7).

The frontiers of British India in the
mid-nineteenth century extended from
present-day Pakistan to Myanmar. British
India included the people and territories
of a number of large empires of the early
modern world, as well as smaller king-
doms, chiefdoms, and communities that
resisted these centralizing empires. By
1947 three nations were partitioned out of
British India: India, Pakistan, and Burma;
and a fourth, Bangladesh, was created
in 1971. Decolonization brought political
sovereignty to the people of South Asia,
but, as David Ludden has pointed out,
“creating national territory meant carving
up. ..imperial spaces and networks.”28
This was a process that was “traumatic,”
as nationalist projects in all four countries
continually deployed
history to define these
nations along shifting
registers of religion,
language, and ethnic-
ity—an endeavor fraught
with violence and
expulsion, as it broke up
networks and neigh-
borhoods, and imposed
carceral boundaries that
restricted mobility in
borderlands that for cen-
turies had been home to
mobile communities ren-
dering their homelands
perilous.2°

Shilpa Gupta’s
works Speaking Wall and
Fenced Borders (42—51)
capture this trauma,
memorializing not only
critical events in South

Asia’s history such as the Partition of
1947, but also reminding us of the his-
torical conjunctures at which separation
is produced. In so doing, she emphasizes
the constructed nature of borders that
renders people and community outsiders,
as migrants who do not belong. While we
think of migrants as mobile, unrooted, and
transient yet visible, Soeaking Wall and
Untitled (There Is No Border Here/No hay
frontera aqui) (40—41) repeatedly invoke
the artificiality, transience, and invisibility
of the border rather than the migrant. The
border is wiped out by the rains and it is
invisible to the communities living in bor-
derlands. The specter of Partition looms
large in Gupta’s work, as she draws atten-
tion to the “fractured geography of South
Asia,” as described by Iftikhar Dadi.*°

Invocations of History

Partition is a central paradigm of
historical and nationalist thought in South
Asia. It is a conceptual category that has
produced postcolonial state projects of
populist exclusion. In India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Myanmar, competing
historical narratives have been used to

Ae FFP — ote Det Pantie Pee

Pome eerie borne

6. “Indian Empire & Ceylon, 1915” (Vincent A. Smith, /ndia in the British Period: Being
Part Three of the Oxford History of India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920], facing 786).

legitimize the making and unmaking of
colonial-era boundaries that were nation-
alized along ethnic and religious lines.

It was this process, rather than mobility
itself, that created “migrants” in South
Asia as communities were—and continue
to be—evicted from their homelands
amidst national discourses that artificially
construct histories of “authentic” nation-
hood along singular religious and territorial
lines. At the same time, histories of mobil-
ity themselves are used to gloss over the
human trauma and violence of decoloniza-
tion. On the other hand, Partition has also
enabled the states’ critics, including activ-
ists, historians, and artists to interrogate
and challenge discourses of non-belonging
in projects of recovery—of a shared South
Asian past—and memorialization. A series
of trees outlined in Gupta’s Fenced Bor-
ders speaks directly to this history. Mango
Tree (47) is a reminder of the common

geography, climate, and culture of India
and Pakistan that is evident in the every-
day eating habits of the people of South
Asia and their love of the mango, the fruit
of the gods, that provides some respite in
the blistering heat of the summer in north-
ern South Asia. In Mangrove (48) Gupta
draws our attention to the stubborn roots
of the trees that grow in the Sundarbans in
the borderland between Bangladesh and
India, uniting the territories of these two
nations at their very foundation. There /s
No Border Here similarly celebrates the
resilience of people and cultures and their
resistance to the endeavors of the nation-
state to separate territories and people.
“Modernity,” as David Ludden suc-
cinctly put it, “consigned human mobility
to the dusty corners of archives that doc-
ument the hegemonic space of national
territorialism. As a result, we imagine that
mobility is border crossing, as though
borders came first, and mobil-
_ ity, second. The truth is more

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= the other way round.”*! In their
invocations of oceanic history
and colonialism’s afterlives,
Shilpa Gupta and Shiraz Bayjoo
return to this truth. Rather than
conceptualize mobility as border
crossing and separation, mobility,
for Bayjoo, facilitates connections
across space and time. Through
*e%0°| mobility, Bayjoo reaches back
“| _ to the enslaved and indentured
\ past of Mauritius to celebrate
‘\| the cosmopolitan, multicultural

ae
sittwe

——— present of the nation, emphasiz-

| ing India’s proximity—rather than
distance—from the island across
“) the Indian Ocean. For Gupta, too,
mobility provides an entry point

_| _ into emphasizing connections

| over separation. Eschewing the
temptation to conflate mobility
with migration and migrants with

Port Bait;

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Nicobar |

border crossing, Gupta critiques

7. Map of South Asia. It is worth noting that the UN includes Myanmar
(Burma) as part of Southeast Asia, not South Asia. This regional
boundary is reflected in South and Southeast Asian historiography
(United Nations Geospatial Information Section, Map No. 4140 Rev 4
[Dec. 2011)).

the border itself for creating
migrants. Her work reveals the
transience and invisibility of the
border that produces violence

at the historical conjunctures at which
migrants are made in the moment of their
expulsion. Simultaneously, in underscoring
the artificiality of the border, even as she
recognizes its potential tyranny, Gupta’s
work refuses to succumb to the hegemony
of such divisions, alluding to the shared
history and homelands of those on either
side. This affectively and effectively estab-
lishes proximity and intimacy, rather than
distance, between India, Bangladesh, and
Pakistan.

The twin forces of capitalism and
racializing ideologies of civilizational
hierarchies reached their nadir in the form
of European modernity and colonialism
in the nineteenth century, as the tensions
of empire manifested in the mapping of
race and religion onto place and people, a

discourse inherited by postcolonial nations

in Africa and South Asia. Far from being

a moment that ended with the departure
of European colonists, decolonization
remains an ongoing process across the
Indian Ocean, as nationalist projects

have tried to manage and contain oce-
anic mobility by raising the specter of the
“outsider” to expel “migrants” and delimit
“national” territory and cultures with
carceral borders. Together, Bayjoo’s and
Gupta’s works interrogate colonialism’s
afterlives in Mauritius and South Asia in
their invocations of oceanic history that
was constituted by mobility. In so doing,
they celebrate the resistance and resil-
ience of the intimately entangled lives of
communities across the Indian Ocean that
colonial and postcolonial states have tried,
unsuccessfully, to disentangle.

Colonialism’s
Afterlives
and
Invocations
of Oceanic

History

Colonialism’s
Afterlives
and
Invocations
of Oceanic

History

Sana Aiyar is associate professor of history at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Her work on mobility and migration across

the Indian Ocean remaps South Asia by examining intimately

connected histories of the region with Africa and Southeast Asia.

Her first book, /ndians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (2015)

focuses on the relationship between African and Indian anticolo-

nial politics in colonial Kenya and its immediate aftermath. Her

current book manuscript, The Partition of 1937: Recovering Bur-
ma’s South Asian History, uses partition as a metaphor to include

Burma in the history and historiography of South Asia through a
study of migrations and religious geographies across India and
Burma.

Shiraz Bayjoo and Denise Clarke, “When the Painterly Meets the
Political,” Arts Cabinet, June 7, 2019, https://www.artscabinet.org
/editorialwhen-the-painter-meets-the-political.

For more on the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, see Sanjay Sub-
rahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political
and Economic History (London: Longman, 1993). Amitav Ghosh’s /n
an Antique Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) also invokes this
deep history of circulation across the Indian Ocean.

Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism
and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2007) and Pedro Machado, Oceans of Trade: South Asian
Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1850 (Cambridge:
CUP, 2014).

Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of
Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006). See also Sunil S.
Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the
Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013) and Thomas
R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena,
1860—1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2015) and Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law
and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780—1950 (Cam-
bridge: CUP, 2017).

Bose, Hundred Horizons, 72—121 and Rajat Kanta Ray, “Asian
Capital in the Age of European Dominance: The Rise of the Bazaar,
1800-1914,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 3 (July 1995): 449-554.

Aiyar, Indians in Kenya and Michael Adas, The Burma Delta: Eco-
nomic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier,
1852-1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour
Overseas, 1830—1920 (New York: Institute of Race Relations, Oxford

UP, 1974); Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and
Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadel-
phia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1998); and David Northrup,
Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834—1922 (Cambridge:
CUP, 1995).

Amrith, Crossing the Bay, 28, 104.

Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014). Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
(London: John Murray, 2008) beautifully captures the political and
human toll of indenture. For an autobiographical account of inden-
ture, see Totaram Sanadhya, My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands
& The Story of the Haunted Line, ed. and trans. John Dunham Kelly
and Uttra Kumari Singh (Suva: Fiji Museum, 1991).

Bayjoo and Clarke, “Painterly Meets the Political.”

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey around the World, vol.
2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1899), 294.

See Patrick Eisenlohr, “Mediality and Materiality in Religious Perfor-
mance: Religion as Heritage in Mauritius,” Material Religion 9, no. 3
(2015): 328—48.

Mathieu Claveyrolas, “From the Indian Ganges to a Mauritian Lake:
Hindu Pilgrimage in a ‘Diasporic’ Context,” in Pilgrimage and Politi-
cal Economy: Translating the Sacred, ed. Simon Coleman and John
Eade (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 21—39, 30.

Claveyrolas, 32.
Claveyrolas, 30-31.

For more on religious festivals and sacred geographies in the dias-
poric context, see Frank Korom, Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Perfor-
mances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Sunil S. Amrith, “Tamil Diasporas across
the Bay of Bengal,” American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (June
2009): 547—72; and Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “‘Following Custom’?
Representations of Community among Indian Immigrant Labour in
the West Indies, 1880—1920,” /nternational Review of Social History
51, no. 14 (Dec. 2006): 173-202.

For details, see Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and
His Struggle with India (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) and Ram-
achandra Guha, Gandhi before India (London: Allen Lane, 2013).

See John Dunham Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality,
and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), and Aiyar, Indians in Kenya.

V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) (London: Penguin,
1992); Anjali Prabhu, “Representation in Mauritian Politics: Who
Speaks for African Pasts?,” International Journal of Francophone
Studies 8, no. 2 (Aug. 2005): 183-97.

For details see Aiyar, Indians in Kenya.

For an account of Gandhi’s sub-imperialist and divisive politics in
South Africa see Ashwin Desai and Goolam H. Vahed, The South Afri-
can Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford: SUP, 2015). See
also Antoinette M. Burton, Brown over Black: Race and the Politics of
Postcolonial Citation (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2012) for a
critique of Indians’ racializing discourse.

For the 1949 riots in Durban, see Jon Soske, /nternal Frontiers: Afri-
can Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South
Africa (Athens: Ohio UP, 2017).

Amrith, Crossing the Bay.

Thant Myint-U, “Myanmar, an Unfinished Nation,” Nikkei Asian
Review, June 17, 2017, https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Myanmar
-an-unfinished-nation.

Sana Aiyar, The Partition of 1937: Recovering Burma’s South Asian
History (forthcoming).

See Aiyar, Indians in Kenya and Anneeth Kaur Hundle, “Exceptions
to the Expulsion: Violence, Security and Community among Ugandan
Asians, 1972—79,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 1 (Feb.
2013): 164—82 and Edgar Taylor, “Asians and Africans in Ugandan
Urban Life, 1959-1972” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016).

David Ludden, “The Tragedy of the Nation: History and the Rohingya
Crisis” published as “Perilous Homelands: The Rohingya Crisis and
the Violence of National Territory,” Daily Star, Apr. 1, 2019, https://
www.thedailystar.net/in-focus/news/perilous-homelands-1722988.

Ludden, “Perilous Homelands.”

Iftikhar Dadi, “Frayed Geographies and Fractured Selves: Shilpa Gut-
pa’s Untitled (2014—15),” in My East Is Your West: Collateral Event
Venice Biennale 2015 (Venice: Gujral Foundation, 2015), 70—75,
http://shilpagupta.com/web/about/bibio/2016/id.htm.

David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the

Mobility of Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 4 (Nov. 2003):
1057-78.

Colonialism’s
Afterlives
and
Invocations
of Oceanic

History

= (b. 1972) was born in Nairobi and trained

at Yale (MFA sculpture, 2000). In her

paintings, collages, films, performances, and

sculptures she dissects, reconstitutes, and
recontextualizes images to construct new ways of looking at what we have already seen, or highlights what we
have never actually perceived. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo shows, including Wangechi
Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (2013-14) and exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Musée d’art
contemporain de Montréal; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Museum of
Contemporary Art San Diego, among others. Mutu is the recipient of many awards and her work was included
in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade exhibition Wangechi Mutu: The
NewOnes, will free Us (2019-20).

Credits: © 2005, 2015 Wangechi Mutu
All works appear courtesy of Wangechi Mutu and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels and belong to the

artist.
85

Wangechi Mutu

Amazing Grace, 2005
digital video, 7:06 (video still)

Wangechi Mutu

Amazing Grace, 2005
digital video, 7:06 (video still)

Wangechi Mutu

Amazing Grace, 2005
digital video, 7:06 (video still)

Wangechi Mutu

Amazing Grace, 2005
digital video, 7:06 (video still)

Wangechi Mutu

Amazing Grace, 2005
digital video, 7:06 (video still)

Wangechi Mutu

Amazing Grace, 2005
digital video, 7:06 (video still)

Wangechi Mutu

I’m too Misty, 2015
collage painting on linoleum, 40 x 33 in.

The Indian Ocean after 1945

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

An ocean crowded with warships. An unsuspecting fish pierced by a harpoon. A sub-
marine slinking off the coastline. Explosions shaking the earth. The images Penny Siopis
uses in She Breathes Water (104—9) generate unease, unsettling our image of the Indian
Ocean as a tropical Eden—a paradise that is, as such, out of time.

The chasm between Siopis’s film and the popular imagination reveals the need to
understand the historical junctures, breaks, and ripples that have fashioned the region.
Like many of the works in /ndian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives, these images
speak of conflict and destruction, of extraction and exploitation, and, above all, of
constant motion. Since 1945, maritime environments have been the setting for imperial
designs, dreams of postcolonial solidarity, the assertions of nation-states, efforts to con-
trol the movement of people, the transport of goods in the biggest ships ever seen, and
the extraction of the sea’s bounty. The Indian Ocean as we know it is the result of the
interaction between human aspirations and its watery realms. And of the myriad forms of
violence that often accompany the human thirst for power.

Life and Death of the British Lake

The contemporary Indian Ocean has been shaped by global conflict. In the early
twentieth century the region was a colonial sea, its rim and sea-lanes dominated by the
British Empire and, in places, by the Dutch, the French, and the Portuguese. Japan’s
conquest of Southeast Asia in 1940—42 ripped apart these structures of dominance.
With Singapore, the Sunda Straits, and the Andaman Islands under its control, Tokyo
held the keys to the “British Lake.” For the next four years, Japan challenged the Allies
for dominance of the Indian Ocean’s ports, islands, and routes—all vital cogs for the war
effort.!

After Japan’s defeat in 1945, European powers were poised to resume their political
positions across the Indian Ocean. The British Empire was resurgent, while France and
the Netherlands were set on the reconquest of Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Yet
the military debacle of World War II had taken a huge psychological and political toll and
tarnished the prestige of Europeans. War and Japanese occupation had electrified anti-
colonial nationalist and communist movements from India to Malaysia. As global conflict
gave way to decolonization, the Indian Ocean’s political map morphed from a congeries
of imperial networks and dependencies into a jigsaw of independent states.

The end of colonial rule in the Indian Ocean was, no matter the ruling power, a pro-
tracted and heterogeneous phenomenon. Decolonization’s momentum and shape were

neither predetermined nor unidirectional.
Several decades separate India and Paki-
stan’s independence in 1947 from that of
Mozambique, Djibouti, and the Seychelles
in the late 1970s, not to speak of Brunei
in 1984. In some cases, as in Ceylon and
French India, there were peaceful consti-
tutional transitions. Others, such as Ken-
ya’s, Vietnam’s, and Indonesia’s, came on
the backs of violent anticolonial struggles,
often many years in the running. In places
like the Indian subcontinent, Singapore,
and Malaysia, or the Comoros, indepen-
dence meant partitions and separations.
The success of anti-imperial national-
isms should not obscure the existence of
“loyalist” forces either.? In this and many
other ways, freedom had its fair share of
ambiguities.

Nor did decolonization mean the end
of the European presence in the Indian
Ocean. France successfully kept a sover-
eign foothold in the southwest, using La
Réunion and Mayotte to legitimize itself as
a hybrid presence, at once indigenous and
external to the region.* The British Empire
did not abandon its ambitions in the Indian
Ocean either. Initially, it re-centered its
old Indian core to places like East Africa
and Malaya and rebuilt its Singapore and
Hong Kong fortresses. When transfers of
power could not be avoided, it cast old
ties afresh, modernizing the Common-
wealth. London deployed technological,

The Indian
Ocean after
1945

strategic, and economic expertise or arms
sales as levers of influence. It also did
some administrative reshuffling, like that
which wrested control of the Persian Gulf’s
micro-states from Delhi in the waning days
of British India. As the maintenance of
territorial dominions became increasingly
unrealistic, Britain focused on securing

a network of bases in coastal and island
states, from which it could project mil-
itary power when needed.® Some of its
plans, in Balochistan and the Andaman
and Nicobar Islands for instance, came to
nothing. But it did manage to hold on to
Trincomalee in Ceylon, the Indian Ocean's
preeminent naval base and one of the
world’s finest natural harbors (fig. 1). This,
among other factors, ensured the Royal

1. Commonwealth navies training in Trincomalee Harbor, Apr. 1952 (Imperial
War Museums, Admiralty Official Collection, A 32103).

2. Performing postcolonial solidarity. The Bandung Conference in action, Apr.
1955 (National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia, 550420 FP 31).

Navy’s continued importance in the Indian
Ocean.®

This postwar British position was vul-
nerable to the changing political climate in
the Indian Ocean. After a left-wing govern-
ment came to power in Ceylon in 1956,
London abandoned Trincomalee. A decade
later, it announced its goal to withdraw
“east of Suez,” accepting a reduced role
as a regional power rather than an Indian
Ocean or global one. The retreat was never
total, even after the return of Hong Kong to
China in 1997. Yet London’s acceptance
of the new order showed that the British
Lake’s demise had really taken place.’

The Postcolonial Sea

The end of European supremacy
coincided with the Cold War and the rise
of solidarity movements among newly
independent states of the Indian Ocean
and beyond. Historians now believe
that the Cold War was much more than
a European and North American affair
structured around Great Power blocs
and nuclear deterrence. It was a global
conflict, an ideological clash between
mutually exclusive visions of modernity
fought over swaths of the planet that, as
they emerged from colonization, were
debating what societies to build out of its
ashes. All around the Indian Ocean rim,
the Soviet Union and the United States
vied for influence with development aid,
technological assistance, educational and
scientific exchanges, and counter-insur-
gency training and arms sales. This Cold
War was waged on the economic front and
through cultural diplomacy as much as
through arms.®

Decolonization had its own momen-
tum, however. In 1955, Sukarno of Indone-
sia invited leaders from twenty-nine Asian,
Arab, and African nations to Bandung, a
city that had once epitomized the genteel
facade of Dutch colonialism. Statesmen
famous for their contributions to the
global movement for decolonization were
there—Nasser from Egypt, Nehru from
India, Zhou Enlai from China—alongside
representatives from countries still under

colonial rule, like the Gold Coast (Ghana)
(fig. 2). The significance of the event did
not escape contemporaries. A new world
was being willed into being at Bandung.
A world where African, Arab, and Asian
nations long denied self-determination
and a voice in international affairs would
now speak out, freely and collectively.®

Bandung was only the most publi-
cized of dozens of initiatives that strove
to transform the international order in the
name of anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and
non-alignment.?° Afro-Asianism was one
of them, and it energized far more than
statesmen and freedom fighters. From
western Africa to Melanesia, from Arabia
to China, intellectuals, artists, and activ-
ists for racial and gender equality came
together under the banner of Afro-Asian-
ism and formed professional associations,
organized conferences, and published
tracts on the issues of the day. Trade
unionists mobilized across borders; the
Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau re-imagined
world literature, rejecting Eurocentrism;
lawyers traveled the world to defend
human rights; the Afro-Asian Journalists’
Association pushed for the collaborative
production of news.!! The geographical
center of much of this solidarity was the
Indian Ocean.

From the late 1960s, decolonization
and the Cold War conspired to give the
Indian Ocean a key role in postcolonial
struggles. The superpowers’ naval pres-
ence in its waters was growing. Nuclear
submarines sporting US and Soviet colors
cruised its underwater highways. Warships
increasingly visited its ports. Washington
looked to build bases at choke points like
the tip of South Africa, and Moscow eyed
similar installations in the Horn of Africa. 12

Seeing the ocean that lapped their
coastlines turn into a Cold War theater
elicited strong reactions in the nations that
ringed it. (It also raised the possibility of
the South African regime, now pursuing
apartheid, being further propped up by its
Western allies.) Anglo-American indiffer-
ence to these concerns was demonstrated
before Mauritius’s independence in 1968.

London removed an archipelago north of
it, the Chagos, from the island-state’s con-
trol, expelled local inhabitants, and signed
an agreement with Washington for a major
base on the Chagos island of Diego Garcia
(fig. 3). Chunks of the Seychelles were
thrown in as well. This was a denial of
postcolonial sovereignty and self-determi-
nation—one that would enable the US to
build, with British help, a strong military
presence right in the heart of the Indian
Ocean.!°

The Indian Ocean became a front line
of Afro-Asian activism. Following Sri Lanka
(Ceylon’s new name), the group began
advocating for an Indian Ocean “zone of
peace.” In 1971-72, Afro-Asian nations
won an ad hoc UN committee to look into
the demilitarization of the ocean, part
of a series of initiatives aimed to safe-
guard different regions of the world from
superpower competition and the threat
of nuclear war. Maritime spaces were at
the center of these efforts, and for good
reason. As the cartoon “One Wave Higher
Than the Last” suggests (fig. 4), the sea
had long been central to the project of
European imperialism, perhaps nowhere
more so than in the British Lake. *4

Pragmatic considerations lay behind
the Indian Ocean zone of peace. The
proposal came at a time of growing turmoil
among Afro-Asian nations. There were
rivalries among some of its members, such
as between India and China, and imbal-
ances of power between large and small
countries. Moreover, the group overlapped
awkwardly with the Non-Aligned Move-
ment’s ambition to trace a third course
away from the logic of Cold War blocs.
Afro-Asian countries were not all partisans
of non-alignment. Some paid lip service to
it, others actively rejected it and pursued
formal alliances with the Soviet or Amer-
ican camps. Most had idiosyncratic and
contingent interpretations of it. These
tensions and contradictions between the
two major strands of postcolonial solidarity
magnified in the 1970s and 1980s, fraying
unity among the countries that formed the
bulk of the Indian Ocean rim.

As a consequence, there was no
agreement on what an Indian Ocean
peace zone would look like, or indeed why
it was being demanded. Official support
often masked deep ambivalences. The
new Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) thought that the power
vacuum that would stem from a zone
of peace would be more destabilizing
than a low-level balance of power. India
hesitated for other reasons. The peace
zone could re-affirm its leadership of the
Afro-Asian and non-aligned movements
and secure its oceanic backyard. Yet Delhi
also needed a US presence to deter China
and it did not want to see its expanding
navy hamstrung by demilitarization. But
for neighboring countries like Sri Lanka,
Indian hegemony was no more appealing
than that of more distant nations.15

In other words, the Indian Ocean
zone of peace proposal was attractive
because it offered a glue of solidarity
among a group struggling to retain it. It
died a slow and silent death, swept away
alongside Soviet-US competition by the
end of the Cold War in the 1990s. But it
arguably kept alive some consciousness of
the Indian Ocean as a space of common
dreams for the countries surrounding it.

Who Moves, Who Belongs

The biggest obstacle to these dreams
came from internal forces. The borders
erected in the Indian Ocean had an
exclusionary logic that, for those on the
receiving end, could be a devastating form
of violence. While engagement across
borders and collective action flourished
among intellectual elites, on a more plebe-
ian level it was another story. The 1940s
to the 1970s saw a breakdown, or at
least a redirection, of ties that had bound
together different shores of the ocean.
Afro-Asian ideals were being undercut by
one of the key things they were meant to
forge: strong, assertive postcolonial states.

In Madagascar (28) and Ma Coeur 2
(27), Shiraz Bayjoo encases Madagascar
and La Réunion in heavy gold frames.
These frames simultaneously imprison

The Indian
Ocean after
1945

and protect. They enclose the land while
shielding it from external threats. The
turquoise encircling the islands echoes
that of a lagoon, a chunk of sea more
connected to land than to the open ocean.
Indeed, decolonization generalized the
notion that the state should be strong,
hold exclusive authority over a well-de-
fined, rooted group of people, and do all
this within a bounded territory—in short,
the territorial state. The inside and the out-
side, the foreign and the domestic, were

CGAPCTA

OF ns Oe a

3. “Hands Off Diego Garcia,” Mahébourg, Mauritius, Aug. 19, 2013 (Kim
Sanghera/Flickr).

om SS RS
Mis, Se as
. eS a . at

nuts ASIWWIY Sy, Ny,
¥

nisan NLLYI ohy

49?
3 w

4. Miao Ti, “One Wave Higher Than the Last” (Peking
Review 9, no. 4 (Jan. 21, 1966)).

The Indian
Ocean after
1945

meant to be neatly separated, telling Us
from Them. +6

This social and political ideal has
seldom existed, yet it was now to be
established within the bounds of former
colonies. For the diverse societies around
the Indian Ocean, shaped by millennia
of exchange, interaction, and mixing,
this proved a challenging and restrictive

5. Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin Dada arrive at Stansted Airport, Sept.
18, 1972 (Getty Images).

model of politics and society. The rise of
nationalism had already led to restrictions
on migration in different Indian Ocean
colonies in the 1930s. With independence,
borders hardened even further. As colonial
subjecthood gave way to postcolonial citi-
zenship, who belonged and who did not—
and policing this—became a fault line that
divided the Indian Ocean world.

Passports were a visible symbol of
this narrowing. So were the citizenship
laws that accompanied them. Treaties
and border checks enshrined the dividing
lines between and within former empires
as national borders, further differentiating
citizens from outsiders. Migration routes
were curtailed. In contrast to the mass
circulation of people around the Indian
Ocean in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the scale of migration
plummeted. Communities whose sense
of belonging rested on cross-oceanic ties
saw the networks that sustained them
reconfigured and dismantled. People con-

tinued to move, but now that movement
largely took place within the borders of a
nation-state.

Most of these new states were multi-
cultural polities, yet the degree to which
they acknowledged this varied. Even when
countries imagined themselves pluralisti-
cally, as in Malaysia, India, or Mauritius,
postcolonial citizenship was precariously
perched between a focus on territory (and
who resided there) and a focus on ethnic-
ity, race, and civilization. In many places,
linguistic, ethnic, or religious minorities
came under pressure. People of Indian
and Chinese descent faced increasing
discrimination in many locales. At times
rejection burst into outright violence,
for example when dictatorships came
to power in Burma and Indonesia in the
1960s (where pogroms echoed earlier
anti-Indian and anti-Chinese riots) and in
Uganda under Idi Amin Dada (1971-79,
fig. 5). In Zanzibar, the merger with
Tanganyika led to the massacre of Indian
merchants and the Arab-speaking elite. In
Sri Lanka, Sinhalese-speakers gradually
marginalized the Tamil minority.*”

For some, the tensions between
citizenship’s ethno-cultural and territo-
rial logics formed a double-bind. In the
decades after independence, minority
groups with a diasporic or transoceanic
sense of belonging were bracketed out
of the nation by governments back in the
“homeland.”!® At the same time, they
found themselves relegated to the mar-
gins of their postcolonial homes—their
aspirations disregarded, their identities
negated, their agency suppressed. The
new map of the Indian Ocean, as it were,
was closing down on them. The tragedy
of the Rohingya—Muslim inhabitants of
Burma’s Rakhine state, stripped of their
rights, murdered, assaulted, and driven
out of their homes by the army and Bud-
dhist nationalism—is perhaps the starkest
example of this.19

Internal conflicts broke out around the
Indian Ocean, from civil wars like that in
Sri Lanka (1983—2009) to all manners of
independence and autonomy movements.

Some people chose to leave. East Africa’s
Indian communities thus dwindled rapidly
after decolonization. Many went not to
India (they thought it had rejected them)
but to English-speaking countries. Their
decision was based not just on Africaniza-
tion policies in Kenya or Tanzania but also
on the fact that, with the end of empire,
the right of non-white people to settle

in the United Kingdom would soon be
restricted.2°

Between the 1940s and the 1970s,
the back-and-forth exchanges that had
woven entire maritime sub-regions into
being, like the Bay of Bengal, quietly
disappeared. New regions appeared in
the political and popular imagination. No
“Southeast Asia” had existed prior to the
Second World War. It first appeared on
the maps of US decision-makers, aided
by universities, then worked its way into
the minds of educated publics. These new
mental maps privileged land over sea and
stressed the territorial state; the latter had
the good grace to stop where another one
started. Cold War imperatives and local
states’ preoccupations combined to make
this a comfortable reality for many people,
but not all.

Migration flows resumed in the late
twentieth century, responding to new
forms of globalization and altered condi-
tions at home. The decline of agriculture
and the rise of the service industry are
now major push-and-pull factors. These
new migratory waves have distinct con-
tours. Much is made of the attraction of
the United States and other Western coun-
tries for highly skilled, highly educated
Asian, African, or Arab migrants—includ-
ing by their home countries. Intra-Indian
Ocean movement is less feted but just as
important. All around South and South-
east Asia, poor and low-skilled migrants
travel to the oil-rich states of the Gulf to
work, turning the barren coast into some
of the most futuristic cities on earth. Often
performed in dire conditions and without
secure rights, their labor enables the sur-
vival of their families at home, and indeed
of entire regional economies. Yet if the sea

had, in between host-land and home-land,
mediated people’s experiences before
1945, today it is the internet, wire trans-
fers, and airplanes that do so.?!

Of Oil and Containers

The exclusion, surveillance, and
discrimination that minorities or poor
migrants have often experienced since
the 1940s remind us of the violence that
states can visit upon people. Economic
transformations have been equally Janus-
faced. The Indian Ocean’s historical
role in international trade has not disap-
peared since 1945; if anything, it is now
enhanced. Air travel might have spelled
the end of oceanic voyages as the primary
mode of passenger transport, but planes
have not been able to displace the cen-
tral role of ships in the global economy.
Ships continue to carry 80—90% of global
trade (and 60—70% of its value), and their
importance is particularly great for devel-
oping economies.?2

In the process, the shipping indus-
try has metamorphosed. Gone are most
tramp ships and small carriers that lined
the docks of Durban, Bombay, and Jakarta
in the 1950s. Container ships and bulk
carriers have taken their place, along with
chemical tankers and other specialized
vessels. Some of them are so big as to defy
imagination. The ULCC-class tankers that
carry crude oil from the Gulf to Asia and
Europe measure well over four hundred
meters in length (fig. 6).

Yet the fundamental difference is not
one of size but one of type, and we owe
this to a very old thing: the box. In the mid-
1950s, an American entrepreneur started
to move cargo not in bulk but packed in
standardized containers, to hasten loading
and unloading and integrate shipping with
land-based transport systems. From the
1960s, containerization spread. Much
as the steamship before it, containers
changed the rules of long-distance trans-
port. Shipping costs, a bane for global
trade, went down. Supply chains became
more fluid, increasing efficiency.?°

There were other innovations. Tank-
ers were created for oil and coking coal,
lifebloods of the postwar economy—their
size increasing along with the trade itself.
Specialized ships began to move things
hitherto too dangerous to carry, such
as chemicals. Ports had to adjust. They
became increasingly mechanized, stan-
dardized, specialized, and eventually auto-
mated (with attendant pressures on dock
workers). Raw materials lost their domi-
nant position in global trade, displaced by
manufactured and semi-manufactured
goods. This revolution at sea and in the
ports did not just accompany new and
explosive forms of globalization. It made it
possible.?4

The Indian Ocean’s routes and choke
points became more important than ever
(fig. 7). If sailing ships were in thrall to the
cycles of the monsoon, today’s vessels
require expertly managed traffic lanes,
increasing the strategic importance of
zones where shipping concentrates.”°
Avoiding accidents and blockages
depends on technologies that can chart
a three-dimensional path above the sea
floor—something Hajra Waheed’s Unti-
tled (MAP) echoes, with its impression
of a bumpy ocean floor striated by radar
soundings (152—55).

As oil came of age as the world’s
major source of energy, the Straits of
Hormuz and the Bab-el-Mandeb filled
with tankers. In the 1950s, raw materials
traveled mostly in one direction and much
of the shipping traffic headed to Europe
and other Western nations. Toward the last
decades of the century, surging economic
growth elsewhere, especially in eastern
Asia, gradually shifted the epicenter of the
world economy. Trade among the circle
of Western industrialized countries (and
Japan) went from one-half of world trade
in 1980 to approximately one-third in
2011.%

This shift owes something to twen-
tieth-century struggles to change the
rules of global transport. For much of the
century, global shipping remained dom-
inated by companies headquartered in

The Indian
Ocean after
1945

the West. Few countries around the Indian
Ocean had their own merchant fleets. This
exposed them to the vagaries of shipping
rates decided in faraway places like Lon-
don, where cartels set prices, often with
crippling consequences for the developing
economies of countries like Sri Lanka

or Tanzania.?” Ships were increasingly
registered under the ownership of small

458 m

(1509 §)

399 m
(1309 fh)

—_————————————SSSSSS——
Conta See

362m
(1188 ny

Vale Brasil

360 m

I eS (i281 1)
PASSENGEN S

341m
(119

6. Sea monsters. Size comparison between five of the longest ships of their
type (Delphine Ménard/Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 2.0]).

nations, but “convenience flags” scarcely
hid where the true centers of power lay.
Many ports serving national economies
were underdeveloped, or even in the
hands of former colonial rulers.

By the late 1960s, many developing
countries around and beyond the Indian
Ocean were campaigning for radical
change. In the United Nations, the “Group
of 77” used its numerical strength to
advocate a New International Economic
Order.?° On the shipping front, the group
used the United Nations Conference
on Trade and Development (popularly
known as UNCTAD) to force, from the
early 1970s, the reform and regulation of
the shipping cartels. Both initiatives were
eventually undermined.?? The “UNCTAD
code” for shipping was at least ratified by

The Indian
Ocean after
1945

Tine Peeters ryamway

ores Sea
ae 2); o rae
<— Timer:

Inelian —

ee San lanes of commmurcaton

O cmesom

GRE dan Ocenn coset! tes
Lasdacked ates tied to he Incdten Ouran

7. Maritime webs. “West-East-West SLOCs Traversing the Indian Ocean” (Denis Venter, “India and Africa: Maritime
Security and India’s Strategic Interests in the Western Indian Ocean,” in F/uid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in
the Western Indian Ocean, ed. lain Walker, Manuel Jodo Ramos, and Preben Kaarsholm [Lisbon: Centro de Estudos

Internacionais, 2017], fig. 3).

many industrialized nations after 1985,
and since then several countries, nota-
bly in Asia, have become major players
in maritime transport. However, dreams
of a New International Economic Order
collapsed in the 1980s under the weight
of Western pressure and growing diver-
gences among Afro-Asian economies.
Here lay perhaps the greatest fissure
in Afro-Asia or the Third World. Global
economic restructuring had different
meanings on different shores of the
Indian Ocean. Parts of the Asian littoral
have been great beneficiaries of these
changes; Africa’s share of the global pie,
meanwhile, has decreased.*° The interests
of oil- and gas-producing states starkly
diverge from those of other countries.
Economic connections between the east-
ern and northern Indian Ocean and the
Pacific are increasing. A tangible sign of
this reconfiguration is the port of Singa-
pore. The city-state leveraged its two-cen-
turies-old position as a global nexus of
trade to become the world’s biggest port

in 2004, only to lose it to Shanghai shortly
thereafter. We still know little about how
this reconfiguration was fought for politi-
cally by the countries that once comprised
the Third World. What seems clear is that
the Indian Ocean’s ports and lanes were
part of the struggle to reform the unequal
distribution of economic power across the
world.

Frontiers of Sovereignty, Spaces
of Extraction

This struggle was heightened by the
Indian Ocean’s transformation into a key
frontier for state-building and resource
exploitation after 1945. For the last
century or so, the open sea has become
the preoccupation of states and non-state
actors in unprecedented ways. From the
seashore to the deep sea, from the water
column to the seabed, from the fish in it to
the humans crossing it and the oil under-
neath it, the waters of the Indian Ocean
have turned into a space to lay claim to, to
use, to defend, to demarcate. Simply put,

humankind has never had so much to do
with the sea.

Our ability to know the sea, let alone
its resources, was long limited. Nine-
teenth-century explorations launched
the idea of an unclaimed world await-
ing exploitation and mastery, but they
skirted the Indian Ocean. A pioneering
Anglo-Egyptian expedition in the 1930s
notwithstanding, the ocean’s immensity
remained beyond human knowledge. The
region’s exploration truly began after the
1950s. Technological advances such as
the refinement of diving and scanning
equipment and underwater film made
it possible. People could go deeper and
stay longer beneath the surface. With the
International Indian Ocean Expedition of
1959-65, the age of expeditions began.
Fourteen countries participated, from the
United States, France, and Australia to
rim nations like India. This fostered marine
science in several Indian Ocean countries,
from the subcontinent to Indonesia and
Thailand. The financial and technological
costs of such exploration nevertheless
meant that Indian Ocean states generally
struggled to take the lead.*!

New technologies generated new
ideas and possibilities for the extraction
and exploitation of the ocean’s bounty,
just as economic growth fueled demand
for it. The build-up of offshore oil platforms
began, together with the mining of the
seabed. Industrialized countries began
to use new fishing trawlers, bigger and
increasingly mechanized. Japanese boats,
which had traveled far and wide across the
South China Sea, Indonesian waters, and
the Bay of Bengal in the 1930s and 1940s,
made their return alongside other major
fishing nations.°2

Indian Ocean nations too wished
to harness the resources of the waters
around them; they were experiencing
rapid population growth and an attendant
pressure to feed people. Increasing global
demand for fish also meant lucrative
export markets (fig. 8). Between the 1950s
and 1970s, a race for fishing grounds took
place in Southeast Asian waters, Thailand

8. Spatial expansion of the world’s fisheries, 1950-2005 (Sea around Us,
http:/Avww.seaaroundus.org/spatial-expansion/).

leading the way. In India, Gujarat and
the southern states of Kerala and Tamil
Nadu spearheaded fisheries development.
Mechanization and motorization, often
enabled by both regional and international
cooperation agreements for investment
and technological assistance, played a
role in the expansion of the fishing frontier.
So did fishermen, who invested in more
“traditional” boats and gear and formed
active national as well as transnational
associations.*°

Unequal access to maritime resources
was only one area of tension between
industrialized countries and the postco-
lonial nations of the Indian Ocean’s rim.
Under the mare liberum principle, the
high seas belonged to no one. They could
thus be used by anyone, anyone with the
capacity to do so at least. The ocean’s
bounty could be exhausted before local
nations built their own shipping industries.
Territorial waters were not of much help:
they only extended to three miles at sea.

That three-mile zone was
precisely the limit from which,
at one time, ships could be
fired upon from shore. Gun-
boat diplomacy had been
deployed by Western powers
from Madagascar to Guang-
zhou in colonial times, and it
was no thing of the past. In
1971 the US sent an aircraft
carrier within sight of Calcutta
to help Pakistan against India
during Bangladesh’s war of
independence. The “freedom
of the seas” and the rest of the
international maritime order
largely worked in favor of the
powerful, whether nations or
commercial entities.

Maritime issues took cen-
ter-stage internationally. From
1958, UN Conferences on the
Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) took
place to forge an international
maritime order (fig. 9). For
many Indian Ocean countries,
this was an occasion to build
their sovereignty at sea. In general, they
pushed for the extension of territorial
waters, for which twelve miles eventually
became the norm. Indonesia and the Phil-

‘ Contiguous :
oe i
SS
: Limited +
» laweertforcement .
. zon toe Ba

Coast/Baseline

Exclusive Economic Zone

ippines fought a twenty-five-year struggle
to be recognized as “archipelagic states.”
Their territorial waters would now extend
from one end of the archipelago to the
other, regardless of distance.*4 In 1974,
Afro-Asian nations introduced a new con-
cept to assert sovereignty over maritime
resources off their coast (without extend-
ing territorial waters, which would hinder
navigation): the Exclusive Economic Zone
(EEZ). The “law of the sea” signaled the
will of states, not least postcolonial ones,
to control and assert themselves at sea.
As country after country declared layered
sets of maritime zones and boundaries

in the late twentieth century, the Indian
Ocean became a space of sovereign ambi-
tions.

The ocean cannot be controlled in the
same way as land, however. The flag-mak-
ing words of Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (There
Is No Border Here/No hay frontera aqui)
(40—41) sing of a sky that refuses to be
divided and pushes back against human-
kind’s would-be borders. Those words
apply with equal force to the sea. Bound-
ary-making at sea faces constant hurdles.
In the process, new conflicts emerge. The
South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand
are the objects of fierce inter-state compe-
tition, affecting bilateral relations. These

nautical mile (arm)

To a eaximem of 350 ar from the coast/
baseline cr 100 rm beyond the 2.500 mever
Sobath, whichever is greatest

The i High Seas

Sovereignty

'
'
:
v4

9. Slicing up the ocean. Maritime zones under UNCLOS (1982) (Charles H. Norchi, “The South China Sea Arbitration,”
July 28, 2016, https://mainelaw.maine.edu/faculty/south-china-sea-arbitration/maritime-zones/).

The Indian
Ocean after
1945

tensions have an untold human cost.
Somalis take to “piracy” in order to affirm
their legitimacy and find a livelihood. Bur-
mese and Cambodian migrants are sold
into slavery to work on Thai fishing boats.
Elsewhere, fishermen straying beyond an
invisible boundary end up jailed, tortured,
and deprived of their livelihood—forgot-
ten victims of the India-Pakistan political
conflict or Thai-Indonesian resource
competition.*5

Yet the primary victim of this phenom-
enon is the ocean itself. Halfway between
dead jellyfish and grenade-like mass of
rubber, plastic, and God-knows-what,
Nicholas Hlobo’s grotesque Ngumgudu
nemizano (64—65) is not the stuff of night-
mare but of reality. The rich fisheries in
Southeast Asian waters have been almost
entirely exhausted—their sea cucumbers
over-harvested, their seahorses stolen to
furnish overseas aquariums, their sharks
bled alive to feed the appetite for delica-
cies in East Asia. The rest of the Indian
Ocean could soon follow. The transfor-
mation of the ocean into a resource and
sovereignty frontier is harming us all.

In the 2016 installation of Sea Shanty
in Mauritius (fig. 3, 55), Shiraz Bayjoo uses
the walls of Port Louis’s Fort Adelaide as
a canvas on which the life of a corner of
coast is projected, the sound of waves
crashing in the background; amidst all this
plays a song that English mariners once
used when going about their work. The
rhythmic rumble of the ocean overpowers
the sailors’ loud singing. Bayjoo makes
us feel the pulsating weight of the Indian
Ocean’s colonial and imperial past, only to
remind us that the ocean’s “deep struc-
tures,” as the historian Michael Pearson
calls them, somehow find a way to reas-
sert themselves.*°

Sea Shanty (16-20) also reads as a
sign of the ocean’s simultaneous presence
and absence in our lives. The people of the
Indian Ocean seldom travel by sea any-
more, regardless of their wealth. Coastal
societies for whom the ocean was a way

of life are losing out to mechanized fishing
or left ashore by depleted fishing grounds.
Migrants taking to boats to seek refuge or
simply a better life, like the Rohingya, are
refused entry. The port city of old is gone.
The ports are there all right, but seques-
tered behind barbed wire, highways, and
checkpoints—cities unto themselves that
few humans enter, out of sight and out of
mind.

In other ways, the twenty-first century
has an obsession with the ocean. Our
curiosity about it has not waned since the
1950s, when The Silent World, an under-
water documentary shot largely in the
Indian Ocean and its sister seas, aston-
ished contemporaries. The Indian Ocean’s
past as a connector of cultures, goods,
and people is being recovered not just by
historians but by private citizens, organi-
zations, and governments. A ninth-century
shipwreck of an Arab dhow that sunk while
carrying all manners of Chinese luxury
goods is the pride of Singapore’s Marine
Life Park. In 2010, a replica made the
same 3,100-mile voyage from Oman.

This awareness comes with a pow-
erful undertow of fear for the ocean’s
survival and thus, for our own. In this way,
the uncomfortable duet between human
dreams and the violence they have often
unleashed since 1945—on each other,
between neighboring states, and not least
on the Indian Ocean itself—perhaps finds
its full expression. Yet as the sea’s push-
back in Sea Shanty suggests, the ocean’s
very vitality also offers the possibility of
hope.

100

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard is a historian of South Asia and the
Indian Ocean and is currently senior lecturer/associate professor
in contemporary international history at King’s College London.
Her work focuses on the legacies of decolonization on the world as
we know it today, particularly in terms of international politics. She
has written extensively on Sino-Indian relations and on the stra-
tegic borderlands between India, Tibet, and Burma, most notably
in Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962
(2016). She is currently working on the geopolitics of the Indian
Ocean since 1945.

1 Ashley Jackson, Of Islands, Ports and Sea Lanes: Africa and the
Indian Ocean in the Second World War (Warwick: Helion, 2018).

2 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of
Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007); Rana Mitter,
“Nationalism, Decolonization, Geopolitics and the Asian Post-War,”
in The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 3, ed.
Adam Tooze and Michael Geyer (Cambridge: CUP, 2015), 599-621;
Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cam-
bridge: CUP, 2002).

3. David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch, “Introduction,” in “Allies
at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War,
1945-76,” ed. David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch, special issue,
International History Review 39, no. 1 (2017): 1-13.

4 Christian Bouchard and William Crumplin, “Two Faces of France:
‘France of the Indian Ocean’/‘France in the Indian Ocean,’” Journal
of the Indian Ocean Region 7, no. 2 (2011): 161-82.

5 Daniel Gorman, “Britain, India, and the United Nations: Colonialism
and the Development of International Governance, 1945-1960,”
Journal of Global History 9, no. 3 (Nov. 2014): 471—90; Chris Mad-
sen, “The Long Goodbye: British Agency in the Creation of Navies for
India and Pakistan,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
43, no. 3 (2015): 463-88; Christopher Prior, “‘This Community
Which Nobody Can Define’: Meanings of Commonwealth in the Late
1940s and 1950s,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
47, no. 3 (2019): 1-23; Poppy Cullen, “Operation Binnacle: British
Plans for Military Intervention against a 1965 Coup in Kenya,” /nter-
national History Review 39, no. 5 (2017): 791-809.

6 Peter John Brobst, The Future of the Great Game: Sir Olaf Caroe,
India’s Independence, and the Defense of Asia (Akron: University of
Akron Press, 2005); Ashley Jackson, “The Royal Navy and the Indian
Ocean Region since 1945,” RUS/ Journal 151, no. 6 (2006): 78-82.

7 Saki Dockrill, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice between
Europe and the World? (London: Palgrave, 2002); P. L. Pham, Ending

101

“East of Suez”: The British Decision to Withdraw from Malaysia and The Indian
Singapore, 1964—1968 (Oxford: OUP, 2010). Ocean after

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and 1945
the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: CUP, 2005); Vijay Prashad,

The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York:

New Press, 2007).

Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung
Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio UP, 2010); Naoko
Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference
of 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 225—52.

“Visualisation,” Afro-Asian Networks: Transitions in the Global
South, https://afroasiannetworks.com/visualisation; Su Lin Lewis
and Carolien Stolte, “Introduction,” in “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian
Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” ed. Su Lin Lewis and Caro-
lien Stolte, special issue, Journal of World History 30, nos. 1—2 (June
2019): 1-19.

Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, “Manifesto: Networks of
Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (May
2018): 176-82; Hong Liu and Taomo Zhou, “Introduction,” in “Band-
ung Humanism and a New Understanding of the Global South,” ed.
Hong Liu and Taomo Zhou, special issue, Critical Asian Studies 51,
no. 2 (2019): 141-43.

Frank Broeze, “Geostrategy and Navyports in the Indian Ocean since
c. 1970,” Marine Policy 21, no. 4 (July 1997): 345-62.

David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military
Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton: PUP, 2009).

Christopher J. Lee, “The Indian Ocean during the Cold War: Thinking
through a Critical Geography,” History Compass 11, no. 7 (2013):
524-30.

Yogesh Joshi, “Whither Non-Alignment? Indian Ocean Zone of Peace
and New Delhi’s Selective Alignment with Great Powers during the
Cold War, 1964—1979,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 30, no. 1 (2019):
26-49.

Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,”
Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (Feb. 1992): 24—44; John Agnew,
“The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International
Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy 1, no. 1
(Spring 1994): 53-80.

The Indian
Ocean after
1945

Sunil S. Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge:
CUP, 2011); Gijsbert Oonk, Settled Strangers: Asian Business Elites
in East Africa (1800—2000) (Delhi: Sage, 2013).

Itty Abraham, How India Became Territorial: Foreign Policy, Diaspora,
Geopolitics (Stanford: SUP, 2014).

Michael Charney, “The Misuses of Histories and Historiography by
the State in Myanmar: The Case of Rakhine and Rohingya” (paper
presented at International Conference on Protection and Account-
ability in Burma, Barnard College, Columbia University, Feb. 8—9,
2019).

Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2015).

Jeremy Prestholdt, “Locating the Indian Ocean: Notes on the Postco-
lonial Reconstitution of Space,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 9,
no. 3 (Oct. 2015): 440-67.

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),
50 Years of Review of Maritime Transport, 1968-2018: Reflecting
on the Past, Exploring the Future (New York: United Nations Publica-
tions, 2018), 4.

Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World
Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: PUP, 2008).

Espen Ekberg, Even Lange, and Andreas Nybg, “Maritime Entrepre-
neurs and Policy-Makers: A Historical Approach to Contemporary
Economic Globalization,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 1 (Mar.
2015): 171-93.

Kimberley Peters, “Deep Routeing and the Making of ‘Maritime
Motorways’: Beyond Surficial Geographies of Connection for Govern-
ing Global Shipping,” Geopolitics (2019): 1-22.

UNCTAD, Maritime Transport, 8-9.

Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Cen-
tury History (Cambridge: CUP, 2012).

Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduc-
tion,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humani-
tarianism, and Development 6, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 1-16.

Ekberg, Lange, and Nybg, “Maritime Entrepreneurs.”

UNCTAD, Maritime Transport, 8-9.

102

Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and
Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
UP, 2008); A. A. Aleem and S. A. Morcos, The John Murray/MABA-
HISS Expedition versus the International Indian Ocean Expedition in
Retrospect (Paris: UNESCO Reports in Marine Science, 1985), 31.

William M. Tsutsui, “The Pelagic Empire: Reconsidering Japanese
Expansion,” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of
a Global Power, ed. lan Jared Miller, Julia Adeney Thomas, and Brett
L. Walker (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), 21-38.

John G. Butcher, The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine
Fisheries of Southeast Asia, c. 1850-2000 (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 2004); Subir Sinha, “Transnationality and
the Indian Fishworkers’ Movement, 1960s—2000,” Journal of Agrar-
ian Change 12, nos. 2—3 (Apr. and July 2012): 364—89.

John G. Butcher and R. E. Elson, Sovereignty and the Sea: How Indo-
nesia Became an Archipelagic State (Singapore: National University
of Singapore Press, 2017).

Ted L. McDorman, “International Fishery Relations in the Gulf of
Thailand,” Contemporary Southeast Asia 12, no. 1 (June 1990):
40—54; Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma, “Blurred Borders: Coastal
Conflicts between India and Pakistan,” Economic and Political Weekly
39, no. 27 (2004): 3005—15; Kate Hodal and Chris Kelly, “Trafficked
into Slavery on Thai Trawlers to Catch Food for Prawns,” Guardian,
June 10, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development
/2014/jun/10/-sp-migrant-workers-new-life-enslaved-thai-fishing;
Jatin Dua, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).

Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2008).

sg : (b. 1953) lives in Cape Town where she is honorary

professor at the University of Cape Town. She works in

painting, installation, and film/video. Key solo exhibitions

include her survey shows This Is a True Story: Six Films
(1997-2017), Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2018); Penny Siopis: Films, Erg
Gallerie, Brussels (2016); Time and Again: A Retrospective Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape
Town and Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2014—15); and Three Essays on Shame, Freud Museum, London
(2005). She has participated in the Prospect New Orleans triennial and the biennials of Gwangju, Havana,

Johannesburg, Sydney, Taipei, and Venice.

Credits: © 2018—19 Penny Siopis
All works appear courtesy of Penny Siopis and Stevenson Cape Town and belong to the artist.

103

Penny Siopis

can you imagine the world

She Breathes Water, 2019
digital video, 5:12 (video still)

104

Penny Siopis

without you?

She Breathes Water, 2019
digital video, 5:12 (video still)

105

Penny Siopis

A you shoot “sun
‘-S'

She Breathes Water, 2019
digital video, 5:12 (video still)

106

* she breathes water

She Breathes Water, 2019
digital video, 5:12 (video still)

107

Penny Siopis

your history with.me

She Breathes Water, 2019
digital video, 5:12 (video still)

108

Penny Siopis

She Breathes Water, 2019
digital video, 5:12 (video still)

109

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [3], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 9.1 x 11.8 in.

110

Penny Siopis

oes ‘ .
ag ae _ pipe. — | _

Warm Waters [5], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 12.2 x 8.7 in.

111

ey ins Siopis 3
ace —

Warm Waters [7], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.6 x 8.3 in.

112

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [8], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 13.2 x 9.3 in.

113

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [9], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.6 x 8.3 in.

114

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [11], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.6 x 8.3 in.

115

Penny Siopis :

Warm Waters [17], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.8 x 8.9 in.

116

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [18], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 9.4 x 12 in.

117

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [20], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 8.9 x 11.8 in.

118

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [24], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.6 x 8.5 in.

119

Penny Siopis

canto

—_— -
oie >
= ae af

Warm Waters [27], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 9.1 x 11.8 in.

120

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [28], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 9.1 x 11.8 in.

121

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [29], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 8.3 x 11.4 in.

122

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [30], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.8 x 8.9 in.

123

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [35], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 7.2 x 10.8 in.

124

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [36], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 16.3 x 11.6 in.

125

Penny Siopis

= oe

Warm Waters [39], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 15.6 x 11.8 in.

126

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [40], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 15.6 x 15.9 in.

127

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [43], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.6 x 16.5 in.

128

TS) 155

Warm Waters [46], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 9.4 x 12 in.

129

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [47], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 10.2 x 8.1 in.

130

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [51], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 10.2 x 15.6 in.

131

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [52], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 8.7 x 11.6 in.

132

TS) 155

Warm Waters [56], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 12 x 8.9 in.

133

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [57], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 17.9 x 11 in.

134

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [59], 2018-19
and oil on paper,

ink,

11.6 x 8.9 in.

glue,

135

Penny Siopis

2018-

Warm Waters [71]

ink, and oil on paper, 11.6 x9 in.

glue,

136

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [73], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 14.8 x 14.8 in.

137

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [77], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 11.6 x 8.9 in.

138

Penny Siopis

Warm Waters [81], 2018-19
glue, ink, and oil on paper, 10.8 x 8.9 in.

139

Climate Change and the Future of

the Indian Ocean

Sunil Amrith

The work of the six artists featured in Indian Ocean Current is driven by a vital and
creative engagement with an ocean that has a long history as a crucible of empires—and
which, today, is at the sharp edge of global warming. The ocean is again at the heart of
strategic competition and political consciousness, not least because it is the world’s
major conduit feeding our collective addiction to supplies of petroleum.

The works presented here imagine three broad moments in the life of the Indian
Ocean, and chart connections between them previously unseen. The first is a longue
durée of commerce and cultural exchange, cannibalized and reoriented by European
domination after the eighteenth century. Colonial rule allowed a restless industrial
capitalism to reshape the Indian Ocean rim. In the nineteenth century, this maritime
region reached its zenith of integration: a violent, painful integration that forced people
together, but also unleashed an unruly, and sometimes insurgent, process of cultural
mixture that still characterizes the Indian Ocean world. The traces of the hybrid cultures
shaped by this history are everywhere in Shiraz Bayjoo’s series of photographs, Extraor-
dinary Quarantines (21-24), rooted in the landscape of his native Mauritius.

The second historical conjuncture captured in these works is the mid-twentieth-cen-
tury moment of border-making, which tempered the liberatory possibilities of decolo-
nization with a new sense of enclosure. The starkness of Shilpa Gupta’s Speaking Wall
(42—45) speaks of the violence done by borders that divided insiders from outsiders,
majorities from minorities.

Finally, in a third and ongoing moment, we confront a present and future of forebod-
ing, as the rising waters of the Indian Ocean menace those who inhabit its coastal arc.
The specter of climate change hangs over /ndian Ocean Current, lending these works
their urgency and moral force.

What is the relationship between these three moments? As Amitav Ghosh reminds
us in The Great Derangement, the origins of global warming are linked inextricably with
the history not only of capitalism, but of imperialism. The elevation of private profit over
public good, of environmental destruction over preservation, was integral to European
imperialism in the Indian Ocean, notwithstanding its occasional communitarian urges
and the stirrings of early environmentalism. Despite a few dissenting voices, postco-
lonial states learned these lessons well, and tried to apply them better. Has the Indian
Ocean’s centrality to imperial competition left legacies that inhibit new forms of cooper-
ation in the face of environmental crisis? How have the inequalities of the age of empire
imprinted themselves on contemporary Indian Ocean societies, shaping the uneven

141

levels of vulnerability to rising waters,
across and within nations? Perhaps the
most challenging question posed by these
works is this: How might the cultural
intimacies forged by centuries of contact
across the waters allow us to imagine new
sorts of solidarity, now, when the waters
are rising?

The Indian Ocean was no tabula rasa
for European chartered companies to
reshape in their own image. Long before
the arrival of Europeans, merchants from
Kachchh moved money and traded in
cloth and cloves along the coast of East
Africa and in Zanzibar; Tamil Muslims
established themselves in Kedah and in
port cities across Southeast Asia; Chinese
ships visited every port on the ocean’s rim.
The economic vitality of this world is what
attracted the Europeans in the first place
(fig. 1).

The Portuguese entry into the Indian
Ocean was made possible by lethal can-
nons made of sturdier metal. They sailed
on ships furnished with effective naviga-
tional aids. Their advance was sustained
by Christian fervor and greed for Asia’s
fabled wealth. Brutal, Portuguese power
was concentrated at strategic coastal
fortresses. Fragile, it never reached far
inland. Violence was not unknown in the
Indian Ocean before the arrival of Euro-

Climate *

Change and
the Future
of the Indian

Ocean

1. Chintz fragment from the Coromandel Coast, made
for the European market, c. 1720—40 (Victoria & Albert
Museum, London, 1584-1899).

peans; what was new were the claims of
exclusive sovereignty that European char-
tered companies, backed by states and
navies, asserted over land and sea. As the
Dutch and English East India Companies
rose to challenge Portuguese supremacy
in the seventeenth century, the maritime
highway between India and China became
a corridor of conflict. For every claimant
to power and wealth in the Indian Ocean,
well into the age of steam power, the
knowledge of climate was vital.

The word “monsoon” appeared in
English first in the late sixteenth century,
derived from the Portuguese mon¢do.

It comes from the Arabic mawsim (for
“season”). In its simplest definition, it is

a weather system of regularly reversing
winds, characterized by pronounced wet
and dry seasons. The monsoon allowed
the Indian Ocean to be traversed from the
earliest times.

European navigators relied on local
nautical knowledge. Among the first to

“or eer Ee

2. A. 1728 map of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea by Ibrahim Miiteferrika for Katip Celebi’s Universal Geography

(Cambridge University Library).

record this nautical wisdom was the Arab
navigator Ahmad Ibn Majid in the late
fifteenth century. For Ibn Majid, the “mon-
soon” (mawsim) was above all a specific
date for sailing from a port. His treatise
shows how regular and predictable the
sailing schedules were for each of the
Indian Ocean’s seas. In his discussion of
the westward journey from Southeast Asia
back to eastern India, he cautions mar-
iners to take advantage of the favorable
winds of the northeast monsoon, advising
them not to set out too late in the season
while reminding them that the northeast
monsoon did not usually arrive in Suma-
tra before the beginning of January. The
timing had to be just right. He warned of
the unreliability of the winds when the
monsoons changed over in March and
April, and the threat of fearsome storms in
October and November.

Ibn Majid’s work was a faithful com-
panion to sailors for hundreds of years
and publications such as Katip Celebi’s

142

Universal Geography likewise contributed
to spreading geographic knowledge of the
Indian Ocean in the Arabic-speaking world
(fig. 2). Yet, as Europeans’ ambitions in the
region grew, they were no longer satisfied
with the state of navigational knowledge.
In the words of K. N. Chaudhuri, “the
greatest achievement of Spanish and
Portuguese hydrographers was to bring
together the work of theoretical mathe-
maticians and combine these with the
practical experience of seamen.” By the
seventeenth century, English and Dutch
navigational charts surpassed those of the
Portuguese; the captains of East Indiamen
were “carefully trained to follow gener-
alized methods on their voyages to the
Indian Ocean.”? The introduction of seago-
ing chronometers improved the accuracy
with which sailors could measure time.

By the middle of the nineteenth
century, English sailors began to collect
systematic observations of the fearsome
storms of the Indian Ocean, of interest

to meteorologists and navigators alike.
Understanding of Indian Ocean storms
owed much to the work of a retired ship’s
captain and president of the Marine
Courts of Calcutta, Henry Piddington
(1797-1858). Piddington’s interest in the
characteristic storms of the Indian Ocean
was deeply practical; he dedicated his
work to “mariners of all classes in all parts
of the world.” In his catalogue of different
types of storms, Piddington proposed a
new word, “cyclone,” to describe those
driven by “circular or highly curved winds.”
He derived his term “from the Greek kuk-
loma (which signifies amongst other things
the coil of a snake).” The new science of
cyclones demanded attention from sailors,
he wrote, “for it is...a question of life and
death, of safety or ruin.” He described
a “storm wave,” of the kind that struck
Bengal with ferocity in 1864, as a “mass of
water...driven bodily along with the storm
or before it”; crashing upon bays and estu-
aries, they caused “dreadful inundations.”
Piddington published in the Asiatic Soci-
ety’s journal a series of ships’ logs, from
which he derived his work on the forces
driving the Bay of Bengal’s cyclones.

The 1864 cyclone in Bengal was so
devastating as to spur the development
of a permanent meteorological service in
India. The science of meteorology pre-
sented a new way of imagining the Indian
Ocean across borders. The expansion
of telegraphic communication allowed
for a new sense of scale to emerge; a
new way of envisaging weather in time
and space. From the collaboration of
meteorologists across imperial borders
emerged an oceanic Asia of storm tracks
that traversed sea and land: a coastal rim
from the Philippines in the east to India in
the west, which shared risks to an extent
previously unimagined. The networks of
storm warnings along the coastal crescent
from India to China mirrored Asia’s mari-
time geography. The names of the stations
that broadcast telegraph reports were the
names of the great ports; the tracks of the
tropical cyclones they monitored were the
tracks of busy shipping lanes.

But as the British colonial government
intensified its interventions into agrarian
India, research on the longer-term regu-
larities of India’s climate, as opposed to
episodic weather, pointed in a different
direction. India’s climatology emphasized
the distinctiveness, even isolation, of the
“subcontinent”—that phrase itself came
into common use in the early twentieth
century. Henry Blanford, first director of
the Indian Meteorological Department,
observed that the monsoon system ren-
dered India “a secluded and independent
area of atmospheric action.”> Ideas about
climate coincided with new understand-
ings of both geology and geopolitics. As
sail gave way to steam and as the demands
of industrial capitalism grew more forceful,
the intimate relationship between seafar-
ing and meteorology frayed.

Even before the nineteenth century,
the scale of human impact on the forests
of the Indian Ocean’s rim attracted the
attention of European naturalists and
botanists. As Richard Grove has shown
in his seminal work, they were especially
concerned with the fate of “island Edens,”
like Mauritius. The desiccationists, as they
were known, believed that deforestation
was a cause of drought. This view gained
prominence through the work of Alexander
von Humboldt, who wrote in 1819 that
“by the felling of trees that cover the tops
and the sides of mountains, men in every
climate prepare at once two calamities
for future generations; the want of fuel
and a scarcity of water.”® Grove sees in
the writings of European naturalists in the
Indian Ocean the early stirrings of con-
servationism—yet it would be hard to see
their interventions as decisive.

In the nineteenth century, the trans-
formation of the lands around the Indian
Ocean accelerated. Precaution was cast
aside. The demands of British factories
precipitated a rush for the commodities of
the Indian Ocean’s frontiers—sugar and
tea, rubber and tin, timber and cotton.
Massive migration followed. In the 1830s,
as political pressure mounted at home for
slavery’s abolition in the British Empire,

143

sugar planters looked to India and China Climate

for unfree labor. The demands of sugar Change and
underpinned the nineteenth century’s
worldwide shift from enslaved African to the Future
indentured Asian labor. In all, around 1.5 — of the Indian
million indentured workers moved from :

cean

India to destinations across the Indian and
Atlantic Oceans—Mauritius, Natal, Trini-
dad, and Fiji were among their main des-
tinations. Alongside indentured laborers,
tens of thousands of convicted prisoners
from India were transported from India

to Bencoolen, the Straits Settlements,
and the Andaman Islands. They built
roads, cleared forests, erected buildings,
cultivated gardens, cleaned cities. The
empire’s violent appetite for labor dis-
tinguished the mobility of the nineteenth
century from earlier times. The scars of
that violence, and memories of the Indian
Ocean’s distinctive experience of unfree
labor, run through the work of Shiraz Bay-
joo (16—24) and Wangechi Mutu (86-91).
Bayjoo’s moving video installation, Sea
Shanty, evokes the journeys of the inden-
tured laborers, the song a testimony to
their suffering and resilience.

In the Indian Ocean's history, changes
in the sea came long after the lands
around its edge had been transformed by
migrant labor. “With an ever-accelerating
tide of human impact,” a leading marine
biologist writes, “the oceans have changed
more in the last thirty years than in all of
human history before.”” The relative ease
of crossing the Indian Ocean’s water cre-
ated bonds of culture and commerce over
centuries. Under colonial rule, the force
of capital transformed the landscapes of
the Indian Ocean’s littoral. Through all of
these changes, “the oceans themselves
seemed changeless,” and “contrasted
with the world above water, where land-
scapes underwent dramatic alterations.”
This contrast holds no more.® Starting
around the 1950s, and with accelerating
effects since the 1970s, a concatenation
of changes began to affect the seas—a
rapid expansion in the human population;

Climate
Change and
the Future
of the Indian

Ocean

increased settlement in large coastal cit-
ies; an expansion of the “fishing frontier,”
propelled by deep-sea trawling; rapid, if
uneven, industrialization in the parts of the
world once under European colonial rule;
agricultural intensification, buoyed by
massive pesticide use; and an insatiable
appetite for fossil fuels.

The forces that now choke the life
from the Indian Ocean began as unin-
tended, initially unseen, consequences of
the political choices that states and peo-
ples made as a new world arose from the
ruins of war and the remnants of empires.
The policies that sought to extend territory
into the ocean—projects to increase food
security, schemes of industrialization to
provide employment—represented an
advance in human freedom around the
Indian Ocean. They emerged in reaction to
an imperial world where lives were cheap:
where labor was uprooted for the profit of
European planters, where migrant workers
were denied their humanity, where colo-
nial policies left millions to starve. When
the Indian Ocean began to be walled off, in
the 1930s and 1940s, it was at least partly
in order to secure a different—and, many
felt, a more substantive—freedom: the
political rights of citizens of free nations,

and the rights to livelihood that these

new nations would provide. From the
mid-twentieth century, the Indian Ocean’s
political and economic fragmentation

had important ecological consequences,
some of which are only clear in retro-
spect. As the avenues of emigration and
interregional trade were closed off by new
national borders, the growing populations
of the region could only be sustained by a
massive intensification of domestic agri-
cultural production. As they turned away
from oceanic commerce, coastal cities
grew rapidly: port cities turned inland, and
became industrial centers. The treatment
of the ocean as an extension of national
territory facilitated its over-exploitation as
a resource.

In a world newly divided between the
superpowers, in which newly independent
countries asserted their rights to develop
their resources, the Indian Ocean became
both a source and a conduit for that most
vital of modern substances. During the
Second World War, Bengali astrophysi-
cist and left-leaning nationalist Meghnad
Saha saw how important oil would be to
the future; he urged soon-to-be indepen-
dent countries like India not to cede their
oil resources to the ever more powerful
conglomerates. Two decades
later, Auguste Toussaint,
chief archivist of Mauritius
and a noted local historian,
wrote a synthetic history of
the Indian Ocean in 1961
(translated into English in
1966); he saw the age of
petroleum as inaugurating
a new phase in the ocean’s
history. “After the steamship
and electricity came oil,” he
wrote; “the three formed a
triad which has dominated
all oceanic history until
today.” Toussaint compared
these technologies to “those
deities with several arms
which are found in Hindu

ee ee

terrifying Shiva, frenetically dancing ina
circle of fire, principle at once of creation
and destruction, yet more often engaged
in destroying than creating.”® The works in
Indian Ocean Current show that Toussaint
was prescient.

By the 1960s the Indian Ocean was
largely invisible to states in South Asia,
which looked no further than the waters
immediately off their coasts. Migrants had
once traversed the sea with few restric-
tions, in a pattern of circular migration.
Now they faced an obstacle-strewn space
governed by passports and visa restric-
tions. Trading connections across the
Indian Ocean reached their lowest ebb.

But despite its long centrality to the
ambitions of empire builders, to many
scientists the Indian Ocean remained
“the largest unknown area on earth.” Paul
Tchernia, who worked in the physical
oceanography laboratory of the Muséum
national d’histoire naturelle in Paris,
described it as the “forlorn ocean.” Return-
ing from a voyage through the Indian
Ocean en route to and from the Antarctic,
he suggested that an international inves-
tigation of the Indian Ocean should be
incorporated into the activities of the UN’s
International Geophysical Year in 1957—
58: a massive exercise in coordinated data
gathering that transformed knowledge
of Earth’s physical processes. Tchernia’s
suggestion came too late to include the
Indian Ocean in that giant program, but
there was a convergence of interest in
investigating the least well-studied among
the world’s oceans. The International
Indian Ocean Expedition ran from 1959 to
1965, involving forty ships from thirteen
countries (fig. 3).1°

Oceanographers were drawn to the
Indian Ocean for the same reason that
medieval traders could cross it—the sea-
sonal reversal of the monsoon winds. This
pattern of reversing winds made the Indian
Ocean unique; “a model of the world

ocean,” upon which scientists could test
their “wind-driven models.”!+ Many scien-

temples.” Among them, “oil
might appear as a kind of

144

3. Cruise tracks of vessels on the International Indian Ocean Expedition (ESSO-Indian National
Centre for Ocean Information Services, https://incois.gov.in/portal/iioe/aboutus.jsp).

tists who lived on the ocean’s rim, espe-
cially those in government service, had
more immediate interests. The ocean’s
fisheries held the potential to address
concerns about food shortage in Asia and
Africa; its mineral wealth had barely begun
to be exploited. Unlocking the mechanism
of the ocean’s influence on climate could
provide the key to food security and eco-
nomic development. !4

The Expedition’s research aims
encompassed the study of ocean currents
and littoral drift; an investigation of ocean
chemistry, salinity, and temperature;
the exploration of marine life, especially
fisheries; and the study of atmospheric
conditions, including wind and rainfall.
Much of the excitement came from the
new technologies that allowed scientists
to see the sea afresh. Sonar let scientists
hear enough to map the Indian Ocean’s
seafloor with heightened accuracy—their
images evoked an underwater continent
as varied in its topography as the land
above. Advances in satellite technology
provided synoptic pictures of cloud cover
and precipitation. Computers allowed
scientists to process quantities of data
beyond all precedent: Klaus Wyrtki of the
University of Hawaii oversaw the produc-
tion of an oceanographic atlas, which
processed data from twelve thousand
hydrographic stations stored on two hun-
dred thousand computer cards. 3

Among all of the Indian Ocean Expe-
dition’s endeavors, one observer wrote,
“none shows more contrast between past
and present than meteorology.”!4 The
Expedition marked the most intensive
investigation of the South Asian mon-
soon since the work of Sir Gilbert Walker
in the 1910s and 1920s, now with a raft
of new tools. Fascinating though it was
to glimpse the ocean’s floor, for many
scientists the most urgent priority for the
Indian Ocean Expedition was to provide
a better picture of Asia’s climate. Almost
a century after the establishment of
the Indian Meteorological Department,
scientists wrote in 1962 that “inadequate
knowledge of the large-scale influences on

weather have always hampered weather
forecasting.” The need to understand the
monsoon “has become even greater and
more urgent,” they argued, “in view of the
large-scale development plans of many
of the countries in the field of agriculture,
exploitation of water resources, flood
control programmes, and programmes for
ameliorating the consequences of weather
extremes.” Economic planning demanded
“accurate advance information on the
onset of the rains, its variations from day-
to-day” and “the occurrence of spells of
heavy rain and breaks.”+5

In his 1927 presidential address to
the Royal Meteorological Society, Gilbert
Walker had speculated that “variations
in activity of the general oceanic circu-
lation” would likely be “far reaching and
important” in understanding the world’s
climate.+¢ It was not until the 1960s,
bolstered by data collected during the
International Geophysical Year and the
Indian Ocean Expedition, that his insight
would be developed. Walker’s pioneering
work on the lateral connection between
the climates of the Indian Ocean and the
Pacific—what he had called the South-
ern Oscillation—now acquired a vertical
dimension. The Indian Ocean Expedition
focused on understanding the exchange of
energy between the ocean and the atmo-
sphere, driven by monsoon winds. Piece
by piece, scientists sought to understand
the large-scale monsoon circulation of the
Indian Ocean. The reversal in the direc-
tion of the monsoon winds had been well
known for centuries, but it was more diffi-
cult, one scientist wrote, to “determine the
vertical limits—than the horizontal—of the
monsoon influence.” Changes on Earth’s
surface were linked with changes in the
deep sea, and in the upper atmosphere. ?”

More ominous signs emerged from
the Indian Ocean Expedition. Two years
before it began, one of its leaders, Scripps
oceanographer Roger Revelle had writ-
ten with his colleague, geochemist Hans
Suess, that human beings were conduct-
ing, unwittingly, a “large scale geophysical
experiment” with the world’s climate.

145

“Within a few centuries,” Revelle and Climate

Suess wrote, “we are returning to the Change and
atmosphere and oceans the concentrated
organic carbon stored in sedimentary the Future
rocks over hundreds of millions of years.”"® ofthe Indian
One of Revelle’s students, Charles Keel- ‘

cean

ing, was the first to start systematic
measurements of atmospheric carbon
the following year, at Mauna Loa, in 1958.
Revelle and colleagues had long-range
goals for their study of the Indian Ocean:
they wanted to see how far the Indian
Ocean was being treated as a “dump for
the waste products of industrial civili-
zation.” And they sought to determine
“the role of the ocean in climatic change,
especially in absorbing the carbon dioxide
spewed into the atmosphere when fossil
fuels are burned.”?9

We have forgotten how important
the Indian Ocean was to documenting
anthropogenic climate change, prompting
early stirrings of alarm. The data to come
out of the Indian Ocean voyages sug-
gested that the sea and the atmosphere
were being affected by human activity
on land. But these “long-range” prob-
lems were then distant from the level of
human experience. The time horizons of
oceanic research were incommensurable
with those of planning for food security.
Because the long-range monsoon forecast
remained elusive, because understand-
ings of climate grew more complex, it was
easier to focus on what could be contained
and controlled—one river valley at a time.

Already the warmest of the world’s
oceans, there has been a steady and
continuous warming of the “warm poo
in the central-eastern Indian Ocean over
the past half century. These changes were
only beginning at the time of the Indian
Ocean Expedition of the 1960s; but the
international cooperation of that era laid
the foundations for the infrastructure of
data collection and oceanographic study
that has made clear the Indian Ocean’s
plight. Recent studies have suggested an
even sharper warming trend in the nor-

Climate
Change and
the Future
of the Indian

Ocean

mally cooler western Indian Ocean, which
has implications for the thermal contrasts
that drive monsoon circulation.2° From
the time of Gilbert Walker’s research in
the early twentieth century, it has been
recognized that the Indian Ocean affects
climate dynamics across the tropics; it is
becoming increasingly clear that a warm-
ing Indian Ocean has planetary effects.

The UN’s Fifth Assessment Report of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change estimates that 90% of the heat
generated by global warming has been
accumulated in the oceans. The El Nifio
Southern Oscillation serves as “a vent to
exchange this heat from the ocean to the
atmosphere”; this is then “partially trans-
ferred to the Indian Ocean through a modi-
fied Walker Circulation, and is reflected in
the warming trend over the region.”2! One
of the mechanisms of Indian Ocean warm-
ing has been the unexpectedly large trans-
fer of heat from the Pacific Ocean—long
thought to play the most significant role in
the absorption of atmospheric heat—via
the thoroughfare of the Indonesian seas:
the very same seas crossed by merchants
and traders for centuries, at the hinge of
the Indo-Pacific world.22

4. A dust storm (“brown cloud”) caused hazardous air pollution conditions in New Delhi, prior to
monsoon season, June 14, 2018 (NASA-Earth Observatory, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov
/images/92309/hazardous-pre-monsoon-dust-pollution).

The transformation of the Indian
Ocean over the past few decades is not a
story of warming alone. In 1995, the crew
of a small research vessel noticed, as they
crossed the inter-tropical convergence
zone around the equator, a sharp increase
in atmospheric pollutants over the north-
ern compared with the southern Indian
Ocean. The next year, following up these
findings, the Sagar Kanya, a research
vessel operated by India’s National Centre
for Antarctic and Ocean Research (now
the National Centre for Polar and Ocean
Research), observed a sharp rise in aero-
sol depths north of the equator. A satellite
study followed, and revealed the now infa-
mous atmospheric “brown cloud” covering
most of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian
Sea. These findings prompted oceanogra-
phers and atmospheric chemists to initiate
the Indian Ocean Experiment, which ran
between January and March 1999. It
involved over two hundred scientists from
India, Europe, and the United States; “with
five aircraft, two ships, an observatory in
the Maldives, surface stations in India and
several satellites.”??

V. Ramanathan, the Scripps Institute
oceanographer in charge of the project,
noted that “the equatorial Indian Ocean
is a unique natural labora-
tory for studying the impact
of anthropogenic aerosols
on climate, because pol-
lutants from the Northern
Hemisphere are directly
connected to the pristine air
from the Southern Hemi-
sphere by a cross equatorial
monsoonal flow into the
inter-tropical convergence
zone.”*4 The haze, the Experi-
ment showed, was composed
of “sulphate, nitrate, organ-
ics, black carbon, dust and
fly ash particles and natural
aerosols such as sea Salt and
mineral dust”;2> three-quar-
ters of the composition of the
brown cloud were anthropo-
genic. The study found that

146

the aerosol plume reaches its maximum
extent and strength in the dry months of
February and March, spreading over most
of Nepal, Pakistan, India, the Bay of Ben-
gal, the Arabian Sea, and into the southern
Indian Ocean.

It is commonplace in oceanic history
that the sea has shaped the history of
the littoral: the patterns of the monsoon
winds opened up trade routes and storm
surges and cyclones sweeping in from the
sea have posed a recurrent and peren-
nial threat to life on land. Environmental
concerns from the 1960s focused on the
polluting effects of industry on the beach
and the coastal seas. But the Experiment
suggested that, for the first time, some-
thing quite new was happening: human
activity on land, including far inland, was
now impacting the atmospheric chemistry
of the Indian Ocean. By affecting tempera-
ture contrasts between the northern and
southern Indian Ocean, the “brown cloud”
was changing the sea itself. This suggests
a different relationship between the land
and the sea from the one oceanic histori-
ans are used to working with. Even more
fundamentally, scientists suggest that this
“atmospheric brown cloud” is not just a
source of pollution, as we conventionally
understand it; it may be responsible for
changes in the pattern of rainfall over
South Asia (fig. 4). That is to say, it might
be responsible for changing the monsoon
itself: the monsoon that K. N. Chaudhuri,
in a Braudelian vein, had once described
as a “history of constant repetition,
ever-recurring cycles.”26

An overwhelming proportion of the
pollutants that spill into the Indian Ocean
every year come from the land. They
flow out with the great rivers that empty
into the Indian Ocean—the Ganges, the
Brahmaputra, the Meghna, the Godavari,
the Kaveri, the Krishna, the Indus. They
trickle in as refuse from the large coastal
cities that ring the sea’s littoral, places
that were the departure points for millions
of journeys in the age of sail and steam,
now swollen with people and riven with the
new inequalities of globalization. Because

of the size and number of the rivers that
feed into it, and the density of population
around its rim, “the total amounts of nutri-
ents reaching the Bay of Bengal...must be
close to the highest in the world.”2” Every
day, the Bay receives a noxious cocktail

of “organic matter, nutrients, metabolised
drugs, medical wastes, cytotoxic, antibi-
otic and hormone-mimicking materials,
bacteria, viruses and worms, chemicals
such as detergents and a significant
quantity of sediments.”° Floods and storm
surges dislodge pollutants and carry them
over long distances. A plague of plastic
floats out to sea.

The rivers themselves are in “dire”
health; around 80% of the world’s popu-
lation lives in areas where human water
security and biodiversity of river systems
is under cumulative threat.2° The excess
of nutrients that flows through the riv-
ers—most damaging is the nitrogen from
agricultural fertilizer run-off—creates
“dead zones” starved of oxygen.°*° Writing
from the southeastern edge of the Bay of
Bengal in the early nineteenth century,
British naturalist John Crawfurd declared
that “no part of the world abounds in more
fine fish.”3! Two centuries later, the fish are
disappearing.

The Indian Ocean’s coastline is
shifting. Deforestation and aquaculture
encroach on the mangrove swamps that
provide coastal zones with their best natu-
ral flood defenses (fig. 5). And aquaculture
expands as deep-sea fishing provides
diminishing returns. “Mangroves,” Rachel
Carson wrote, “are among the far migrants
of the plant kingdom, forever sending their
young stages off to establish pioneer colo-
nies.” Since her lyrical account, penned in
1955, her beloved mangroves have almost
everywhere been pushed back, their
“colonies” disbanded. Mangroves excelled
in “creating land where once there was
sea.”*? As they give way to industrial (and
often state-subsidized) shrimp farms, the
land recedes with the loss of the “complex
matrix of roots and stems” that “traps and
binds sediment and stabilizes the coast.”*°

The coasts are destabilized (fig. 6):
so much so that many of the world’s river
deltas are sinking. According to studies
conducted in the first decade of this cen-
tury, the great deltas—which host some
of the largest population concentrations
on Earth—are sinking at up to four times
the rate that sea levels are rising. In the
past decade, over ten million people each
year have experienced severe flooding
due to storm surges alone: most of them
live along Asia’s coastal littorals. As a
result of human intervention, much less
sediment reaches the river deltas than
would naturally—sediment that is essen-
tial for the deltas to sustain and replenish
themselves. The “predominant” role is
played by projects of hydraulic engineer-
ing, epitomized by large dams, which
proliferated in the second half of the twen-
tieth century. The trapping of sediment
by dams far outstrips the effects of land
clearance and construction in displacing
it; rather, bypassing “an important natural
filtration system,” storm surges and floods
carry displaced sediment directly to the
sea, while large quantities remain trapped
in reservoirs. The attempt to engineer
away the smaller tributaries that feed
the great rivers breaks the “critical links
between channels and their floodplains”
and “starves delta systems of necessary
sediments.” Reservoirs have increased by
600 or 700% the volume of water held by
rivers.4

The map of cities most at risk from ris-
ing waters resembles a series of beads on
a necklace threaded along the coastline
of Asia. One study predicts that by 2070,
nine out of the ten cities with the most
people at risk from extreme weather will
be in Asia—Miami is the only non-Asian
inclusion. The list includes Kolkata and
Mumbai in India, Dhaka in Bangladesh,
Guangzhou and Shanghai in China, Ho
Chi Minh City and Hai Phong in Vietnam,
Bangkok in Thailand, and Yangon in Myan-
mar.®> Each of these cities will confront
immediately any change in the interaction

147

of land and water, winds, and rain over Climate

Asia’s oceans. In coastal cities along the Change and
ocean’s rim, climate change compounds

a cavalcade of risks that are severe inand _ the Future
of themselves—hasty development driven of the Indian
by property speculation and new forms oe

of middle-class consumption, crumbling
health and sanitary infrastructures, and
a lack of preparedness and precaution,
are all symptoms of profound social and

5. Mangrove conservation project in coastal Tamil Nadu (author’s photo).

6. Coastal erosion in Tamil Nadu, near Puducherry (author's photo).

economic inequalities both among and
within nations.*°

The scale of the crisis ahead is so
forbidding that it can seem unfathomable.
That is where the works featured in /ndian
Ocean Current come into their own. By
shifting our attention to a more intimate
scale, by appealing to our imagination,
they move us even as they frighten us.

Climate
Change and
the Future
of the Indian

Ocean

They touch on the ways that the fragile
bonds of culture across the Indian Ocean,
born of a long and painful history, still
cohere. Penny Siopis’s remarkable series,
Warm Waters (110—39)—using glue, ink,
and oil on paper—forces us to imagine
possible futures: “What do we imagine?”
she asks, “Burning? Drowning? Absolute
alterity?”°7 In the shifting, inchoate forms
of the figures that rise from the warming
waters, she invites us to imagine different
forms of society, different forms of econ-
omy, different forms of solidarity that can
show us a way out of catastrophe.

In 2017, T. M. Krishna—one of the
most talented vocalists to emerge from
the Carnatic music tradition of South
India in recent decades—made a music
video in cooperation with environmental
activist Nityanand Jayaraman. Iconoclas-
tic and forthright, Krishna was already an
important public voice, outspoken on the
caste-based discrimination that continues
to preserve classical music as an elite
pursuit. His video demonstrates the power
of art in the face of ecological crisis. The
song, “Poromboke,” was intended to raise
awareness and support for the preserva-
tion and restoration of Ennore Creek, a
wetland in Chennai that has been eviscer-
ated by unauthorized construction and
unregulated dumping (fig. 7). It stands, in
many ways, as a symbol of the risks faced
by coastal communities across Asia.*°

The film is visually striking. Krishna
and his fellow musicians sit surrounded
by garbage, by construction equipment,
by pipes spilling effluent into the Bay of
Bengal just beyond them, the air is hazy
from pollution. At the beginning of the
video, their faces are covered by masks.
And then Krishna’s powerful voice enters.
He sings:

poromboke is not for you, nor
for me

it is for the community, it is for
the earth

“Poromboke” is a term once used to
denote common lands: grazing grounds,
tanks, land shared by the community. The
lyrics to Krishna’s song trace the semantic
transformation of the word by colonialism
and capitalism. Under British admin-
istration, “poromboke” came to mean
“wasteland”—lands to be acquired by the
state for development and improvement.
It also came to mean “useless person”—in
common parlance in Tamil, still widely
used, a “poromboke’” is a wastrel.°9 Mining
the word for its buried meanings, the song
urges an ethic of care for the land. Krishna
sings:

it was not the rivers that chose
to flow through cities

rather, it was around rivers that
the cities chose to grow

it is for the community, It is for the earth

7. T. M. Krishna, “Poromboke,” 2017 (video still).

148

Krishna’s song probes a deep cultural and
literary tradition to evoke attachment to a
particular patch of land and water. But on
YouTube his video has found hundreds of
thousands of viewers around the world—
touching upon something universal.

Indian Ocean Current shows us that
profoundly local attachments to land-
scapes and memories still map onto
broader solidarities. They are embedded in
expansive imaginative and moral geogra-
phies. They are underpinned by ecological
as well as cultural connections. These
remembered pasts, and imagined futures,
are sustained by collective memory and
collective action, brought to life in stories,
song, and art.

Sunil Amrith is the Mehra Family Professor of South Asian His-
tory at Harvard University. He works on the history of South and
Southeast Asia in an Indian Ocean context, with a focus on the
history of migration and environmental history. He is the author of
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the For-
tunes of Migrants (2013) and Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers,
Coasts, and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (2018). Amrith was
awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and the Infosys Prize in
Humanities in 2016.

1 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the
Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

2 G.R. Tibbetts, trans., Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the
Coming of the Portuguese: Being a Translation of “Kitab al-fawai’dft
usdl al-bahr wa’I-qawa’id” of Ahmad b. Majid al-Najadt (London: Royal
Asiatic Society, 1971), 124.

3 K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: CUP,
1985), 135.

4 Henry Piddington, The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms
(London: John Wiley, 1848); description of “storm wave” in Henry
Piddington, The Horn-Book of Storms for the Indian and China Seas
(Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1844), 20.

5 Henry F. Blanford, Meteorology of India: Being the Second Part of
the Indian Meteorologist’s Vade-Mecum (Calcutta: Government
Printer, 1877), 48.

6 Cited in Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 83.

7 Callum Roberts, Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing (London:
Allen Lane, 2012), 3.

8 Roberts, 2.

9 Auguste Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean (1961), trans. June
Guicharnaud (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 215.

10 This discussion draws on Sunil Amrith, “The Ocean and the Under-
ground,” chap. 8 in Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and
Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

11 Warren S. Wooster, “Indian Ocean Expedition,” Science 150, no.
3694 (Oct. 15, 1965): 290-92.

12 Indian National Committee on Oceanic Research (INCOR), /nter-
national Indian Ocean Expedition: Indian Scientific Programmes,

149

1962—1965 (New Delhi: Council of Scientific and Industrial Climate

Research, 1962), 15. Change and

Klaus Wyrtki, Oceanographic Atlas of the International Indian Ocean the Future

Expedition (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1971). of the Indian
Ocean

Daniel Behrman, Assault on the Largest Unknown: The International
Indian Ocean Expedition, 1959—65 (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1981),
64.

INCOR, Indian Ocean Expedition, 44.

Gilbert T. Walker, “The Atlantic Ocean,” Quarterly Journal of the
Royal Meteorological Society 53, no. 222 (Apr. 1927): 113.

G. E. R. Deacon, “The Indian Ocean Expedition,” Nature 187 (Aug.
13, 1960): 561-62; INCOR, Indian Ocean Expedition, 12; Wyrtki,
Atlas, quote on 7.

Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange
between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase
of Atmospheric CO, during the Past Decades,” Tellus 9 (Feb. 1957):
18-27, quote on 19—20. On oceanography and the discovery of
climate change, see Naomi Oreskes, “Changing the Mission: From
the Cold War to Climate Change,” in Science and Technology in the
Global Cold War, ed. Naomi Oreskes and John Krige (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2014), 141-87.

Behrman, Assault, 11-12.

Mathew Koll Roxy et al., “Drying of Indian Subcontinent by Rapid
Indian Ocean Warming and a Weakening Land-Sea Thermal Gradi-
ent,” Nature Communications 6 (June 16, 2015), https://doi.org
/10.1038/ncomms8423.

Mathew Koll Roxy et al., “The Curious Case of Indian Ocean Warm-
ing,” Journal of Climate 27, no. 22 (Nov. 4, 2014): 8501-9, https://
doi.org/10.1175/jcli-d-14-00471.1.

Ying Zhang et al., “Strengthened Indonesian Throughflow Drives
Decadal Warming in the Southern Indian Ocean,” Geophysical
Research Letters 45 (June 22, 2018): 6167—75, https://doi.org
/10.1029/2018GL078265.

V. Ramanathan et al., “The Indian Ocean Experiment and the Asian
Brown Cloud,” Current Science 83, no. 8 (Oct. 25, 2002): 947—55,
948.

Ramanathan et al., 947.

Ramanathan et al., 948.

Climate
Change and
the Future
of the Indian

Ocean

Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 23.

Ursula L. Kaly, “Review of Land-Based Sources of Pollution to the
Coastal and Marine Environments of the BOBLME Region,” Bay of
Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem (BOBLME) Theme Report, Mar. 1
2004, https://www. boblme.org/documentRepository/Theme_
%20Land%20Based%20Pollution%20-%20%20Urusla%20Kaly. pdf,
14.

Kaly, 25.

Charles J. V6rdésmarty et al., “Global Threats to Human Water Secu-
rity and River Biodiversity,” Nature 467 (Sept. 30, 2010): 555-61.

United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), “Dead Zones Emerg-
ing as Big Threat to Twenty-First Century Fish Stocks,” press release
no. ENV/DEV/758, Mar. 19, 2004, https://Awww.un.org/press/en
/2004/envdev758.doc.htm.

John G. Butcher, The Closing of the Frontier: A History of the Marine
Fisheries of Southeast Asia, c. 1850-2000 (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 2004), 28-29.

Rachel Carson, Edge of the Sea (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955),
240.

Roberts, Ocean of Life, 94.

Charles J. V6rdésmarty et al., “Battling to Save the World’s River Del-
tas,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 65, no. 2 (Nov. 2009): 31—43.

Susan Hanson et al., “A Global Ranking of Port Cities with High
Exposure to Climate Extremes,” Climatic Change 104, no. 1 (Jan.
2011): 89-111; Orrin H. Pilkey, Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, and Keith C.
Pilkey, Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate
Change (New York: Columbia UP, 2016), 65—74.

Pilkey, Pilkey-Jarvis, and Pilkey, 7O—71.

“Penny Siopis: Warm Water Imaginaries,” Stevenson, https://www
stevenson. info/exhibition/3917.

T. M. Krishna, “Poromboke,” YouTube video, 9:33, posted by Vettiver
Collective, Jan. 14, 2017, https:/Awww.youtube.com/watch?v
=82jFyeV5AHM.

On the history of this transition in Tamil Nadu, see Haruka Yanagi-
sawa, A Century of Change: Caste and Irrigated Lands in Tamilnadu,
1860s—1970s (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996) and Prasannan Par-
thasarathi, “Water and Agriculture in Nineteenth-Century Tamil-
nad,” in “New Directions in Social and Economic History: Essays in

150

Honour of David Washbrook,” ed. Joya Chatterji and Prasannan Par-
thasarathi, special issue 2, Modern Asian Studies 51 (Mar. 2017):
485-510.

7 (b. 1980) was born in Calgary and lives and works
in Montréal. Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice
ranges from interactive installations to collage,
video, sound, and sculpture. Among other issues,

she explores the nexus between security, surveillance, and the covert networks of power that structure lives
while also addressing the traumas and alienation of displaced subjects affected by legacies of colonial and
state violence. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include: Lahore Biennale (2020); Global(e) Resistance,
Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Hold Everything Dear, the Power Plant, Ottawa (2019); 57th Venice Biennale
(2017); 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2016); and KW
Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2015). She was a finalist for the 2016 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s
preeminent contemporary art prize, and received the 2014 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award.

Waheed’s works can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa; British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou; Burger Collection, Hong Kong; and Devi Art Foundation,
New Delhi.

All works appear courtesy of Hajra Waheed and belong to the artist.

Installation views: The Mosaic Rooms, London, 2016 (152); Nanaimo Art Gallery, 2017 (153-55)
Photos: Vipul Sangoi (152); Sean Fenzl (153-55); Paul Litherland (156—81)

151

Hajra Waheed

Untitled (MAP), 2016 (edition 1/6)
infographic print on vellum, 304 x 25 in.

152

Hajra Waheed

Untitled (MAP), 2016 (edition 1/6)
infographic print on vellum, 304 x 25 in.

153

Hajra Waheed

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154

Hajra Waheed

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164

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165

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166

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167

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168

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171

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172

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181

The State of the Indian Ocean: A

scientific Perspective

Zara Currimjee

In discussing her series Warm Waters (110-39), Penny Siopis grapples with the
future of our world with climate change. Siopis asks: “With global warming, what do we
imagine? Burning? Drowning? Absolute alterity? And what forms—or formlessnesses—
do we imagine this through?”?! | too, a young person from the island nation of Mau-
ritius, confront these questions. | seek answers from the world of science, however,
which | have studied and know.

Growing up, | was taught that the Indian Ocean was the bridge between Europe
and the silks and spices of the East. It was an ocean crossed by many, starting early.
We learned the story of the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama, who in 1498 rounded
the Cape of Good Hope and found a sea route to the Indian Ocean. With the help of a
navigator, Majid, he succeeded in reaching western India and in 1499 he returned to
Portugal and described to the royal family everything he had seen: gold, ivory, porce-
lain, silks, and cottons being bought and sold in the port cities along the east coast of
Africa and the west coast of India.

Vasco da Gama was not the only one to cross the Indian Ocean. Arabs, Indians,
Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British established themselves all along the Indian
Ocean rim as traders and conquerors. While these settlers undertook scientific investi-
gations, those were secondary to the pursuit of economic and political interests.

The first comprehensive scientific exploration of the Indian Ocean began only
fifty years ago. The International Indian Ocean Expedition (1959-65) is, to this day,
considered one of the greatest oceanographic expeditions. The Expedition was a truly
interdisciplinary effort, embracing meteorology, geophysics, physical and chemical
oceanography, and marine biology and geology. Results from the hydrographic sur-
veys undertaken during this expedition dramatically advanced our understanding of
monsoon variability and dynamics and described for the first time the complex surface
ocean circulation that emerges in response to monsoon seasons.

Years later, in 2014, scientists in Pune, India published a study revealing that the
western Indian Ocean has been warming for more than a century at a rate faster than
any other region of the tropical oceans.? The reasons behind this steady heating are
still debated but the results reveal that the warming of the western Indian Ocean is the
largest contributor to the increase in global mean sea surface temperatures (fig. 1). In
2018, scientists from Austin, Texas, examined geological records and published their
research showing that the Indian Ocean had a much larger impact on climate change

183

Beek # BG

1. Observed mean sea surface temperatures (SST) in Indian Ocean (Roxy et

al., “Indian Ocean Warming,” fig. 2).

during the last ice age than previously
thought. The scientists behind the study
now fear that history could repeat itself.*
Despite these most recent findings,
the Indian Ocean remains the least
studied ocean on our planet. While there
is still much to learn about the ocean, sci-
entists and policy makers know enough
to warn us that it and its coastal regions
are under rising environmental pressures.
Moreover, we now also know that signif-
icant portions of the Indian Ocean are
among the most highly impacted marine
ecosystems on Earth, and the littoral
countries along the Indian Ocean rim are

The State of
the Indian
Ocean:

A Scientific

Perspective

——

INDIAN OCEAN
FOOD WEB

counted among the world’s most vulnera-
ble to coastal environmental risks.

The rest of this essay will examine
what we know about the future of the
Indian Ocean with climate change, and
what we do not.

The Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean is the third largest
ocean. It goes from the southern tip of
Africa all the way in the west to Australia
in the east. North to south it runs from
the Indian landmass to Antarctica. Unlike
the Atlantic and the Pacific, it is not con-
nected to the Arctic and almost resem-
bles a massive lake. The Indian Ocean
is about six times the size of the United
States, and even though it is the newest
ocean on Earth, it is nearly sixty-five mil-
lion years old.

In the roughly seventy-five million
square kilometers that the Indian Ocean
covers there are nine distinct marine eco-
systems: the Agulhas Current, the Somali
Coastal Current, the Red Sea, the Arabian
Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Gulf of Thai-
land, the West Central Australian Shelf,
the Northwest Australian Shelf, and the
Southwest Australian Shelf. The Indian
Ocean is also home to four biodiversity

2. Indian Ocean food web (Zeynep Alta).

hot spots located in southwest Africa,
southern India and Sri Lanka, Southeast
Asia, and western Australia. Thirty-five
thousand marine species coexist in the
Indian Ocean and of all the 793 coral spe-
cies known worldwide, 719 are found in
the Indo-West Pacific region.®

The Indian Ocean comprises over
30% of the planet’s ocean area and it is
rimmed by thirty-six littoral and eleven
hinterland nations. Indian Ocean rim
countries are home to approximately
30% of the world’s population with many
of their citizens highly dependent on the
ocean for their livelihoods and wellbeing.
The yearly value of ecosystem services
provided by the Persian Gulf, the eastern
coast of India, the Bay of Bengal, South-
east Asia, the western Australian coast,
and the Indian Ocean’s small island
states is among the highest in the world.’
These goods and services include:

Fisheries

Indian Ocean fisheries supplied
about 14.6% of the world catch of 77.4
million tons in 2010.8 People rely on fish
for jobs; in Indonesia alone, fishing and
fish farming employ approximately six
million.? People also, just as importantly,
rely on fish for food. It is
estimated that in Egypt,
Malaysia, Mozambique, the
Seychelles, Singapore, Tan-
zania, and Thailand, 20%
or more of animal protein in
local diets comes from fish.
In Bangladesh, Comoros,
Indonesia, Maldives, and
Sri Lanka, that percent
increases to more than
half.1°

Tourism

Coastal and marine
tourism contribute
immensely to the economies
of Indian Ocean countries.
This is especially true in
small island states that rely
on healthy coral reefs and

184

pristine beaches and seas for tourism. In
the western Indian Ocean, coastal and
marine tourism account for $14.3 billion
annually.

Carbon Sequestration and Coastal
Protection

Indian Ocean ecosystems support
economic activity and offer associated
benefits for people and industry. Many
services provided by marine ecosys-
tems are intangible and the benefits are
non-market products, including carbon
sequestration as well as water filtration
and coastal protection from mangroves,
seagrass, and wetlands.

What Is at Risk
Marine Food Webs

In the summer, phytoplankton
blooms cover the surface of the western
Indian Ocean. Phytoplankton are import-
ant because they help regulate climate
and also form the base of the marine food
web; countless species of fish depend on
phytoplankton for their food (fig. 2).

According to scientists at the Indian
Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune,
rapid warming of the Indian Ocean has
reduced phytoplankton populations by
as much as 20%.'2 As waters warm, the
churning of surface water and nutri-
ent-rich deep waters slows down. This
prevents nutrients from reaching the sur-
face where the plankton receive sufficient
light for photosynthesis. As a conse-
quence, rising sea surface temperatures
reduce the availability of a fundamental
building block of life in the Indian Ocean
with cascading effects through the entire
food web. This is leading to falling pop-
ulations of fish and other animals in the
Indian Ocean.

According to the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization, the Indian
Ocean accounts for 20% of the total
global tuna catch, especially the most
valuable bigeye tuna.!? Tuna catches
in the Indian Ocean have declined by
50—90% in the past half century. Indus-

trial overfishing is responsible for much
of that decline. However, scientists warn
that reduced levels of phytoplankton will
be an additional stressor on the tuna pop-
ulation. This overexploitation can easily
lead to a point of no return and species
extinction, not only for tuna, but for many
other varieties of fish in the Indian Ocean.

Coral Reefs

Warming sea waters, caused by
climate change and extreme climatic
events, also threaten the stability of tropi-
cal coral reefs.

Scientists at the University of Exeter
found that higher ocean temperatures
during the 2016 El Nifio led to the die-
off of coral in the Maldives.'4 The most
alarming aspect of coral die-off is that
it leads to a calamitous decline in the
growth of reefs. Before the warming
event, the reefs were growing rapidly, but
after the heat wave the growth collapsed,
threatening the structural stability of the
reefs. This reduces the resilience of these
reefs and makes them more vulnerable
to future heat waves, which are likely to
increase in intensity and frequency as a
consequence of global warming (fig. 3).

The loss of coral reefs has serious
consequences. Coral reefs are fish
nurseries, providing shelter for countless
newly hatched fish. Their destruction
means shrinking adult populations and
declining catches. Coral reef-associated
fisheries sustain the livelihoods, food
security, and protein intake of many
small-scale fishers in the region. The
destruction of coral reefs also leads to
decreased biodiversity as well as weak-
ened shoreline protection.

Northern Indian Ocean Coastal
Communities

Since 1880, sea levels around the
world have risen on average by 0.07
inches per year. However, in recent
years, scientists have observed a much
more accelerated rise in sea level in
the north Indian Ocean." Data on tides
show that the north Indian Ocean has

risen by 0.12 inches per year for the last
three decades, nearly double the global
average.

Many of the world’s most vulnerable
coastal populations are in the northern
Indian Ocean and, for many years, scien-
tists could not explain why that section of
the ocean was rising so fast.

A study from 2017 provides a com-
pelling explanation. It argues that the
swift rise is due to a weakening of the
Indian monsoon. Summer monsoon winds
and rainfall have decreased in frequency
and intensity in the last seventy years.

In the summer, the coming of the mon-
soon moves heat from the northern
Indian Ocean to the southern, but the
weakening of the monsoon has slowed
that heat transfer. As a result, the north-
ern sections of the ocean have warmed
disproportionately, inducing seawater
molecules to heat up and swell in a phe-
nomenon known as thermal expansion.
Unlike other oceans, where sea level rise
is caused primarily by melting continen-
tal ice sheets, the Indian Ocean’s rise is
driven largely by thermal expansion.

Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is at
particular risk. The city is so vulnerable
to rising seas that in May 2019 Indone-
sia’s president-elect announced a plan to
move the capital.!© Researchers predict
that by 2050, 95% of northern Jakarta
could be submerged. Global warming is
not the only reason for the massive floods
that engulf Jakarta regularly. The city is
also sinking, and more quickly than any
other big city on the planet. The sinking—
at a rate of about ten inches per year—is
due to a combination of the illegal drilling
of wells and the weight of the capital’s
buildings. The wells have drained the
underground aquifers on which the city
sits.

While the situation in Jakarta is
extreme, many other Indian Ocean cities
face having to adapt to rising seas. Some
2.6 billion people, or about 40% of the
global population, live in and around the
Indian Ocean. Several cities in India, such
as Chennai and Mumbai, with thousands

185

of slum settlements along the coast, are _—‘he State of

threatened by submergement. the Indian
In addition to big cities, many small

island states, including Mauritius, Ocean:

Comoros, Maldives, and the Seychelles, A Scientific

are in the Indian Ocean. As one of the ;

lowest-lying countries on Earth, the Perspective

Maldives is especially vulnerable to sea
level rise. Aside from their unfavorable

3. Coral bleaching in the Maldives, May 2016 (The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin
Seaview Survey/Richard Vever).

topography, the islands that comprise
the Maldives are threatened because
much of their critical infrastructure is
located within one hundred meters of
the ocean.’” In recent years, the citizens
of the Maldives have been subjected to
more intense rainfall, higher cyclonic
winds, and larger storm surges. The
government has been working to make
infrastructure more resilient and relocat-
ing residents of low-lying atolls.

Southern Indian Ocean Coastal
Communities

The southern Indian Ocean is
warming quickly as well. Regions where
ocean temperatures reached 26.5°C
(the temperature that facilitates tropical
cyclone formation) are now experienc-
ing water temperatures of 30—32°C. 8
Climate change models predict more
intense tropical cyclones with these water
temperatures. However, the dynamics of
storm formation in the Indian Ocean were
poorly understood until a study published

The State of
the Indian
Ocean:

A Scientific

Perspective

in 2018 by a researcher at the University
of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg
showed that with the warming, tropical
cyclones are less frequent, but high-in-
tensity level five storms are more com-
mon.?9

Mozambique, an underdeveloped
country with a long coastline, is espe-
cially vulnerable to storms. In March
2019, Idai was one of the most severe
storms to have ever made landfall in

4. Flood waters in Buzi District, Mozambique after Cyclone Idai, Mar. 21,
2019 (Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters).

that country and one of the most deadly
tropical cyclones to make landfall on the
African continent (fig. 4).

Six weeks later, Kenneth, a category
four tropical cyclone, struck the border

zone between Mozambique and Tanzania.

Kenneth was the most northerly cyclone
to make landfall in Mozambique and
the first to ever strike Tanzania. It was
also unusual to have two severe tropical
cyclones so late in the season, which
usually runs from January to March.
The impact of those two storms
on Mozambique was disastrous and
left close to 2.2 million people in need
of urgent assistance. Many were left
stranded with no homes, food, water, or
basic infrastructure.2° There were out-
breaks of communicable diseases, with
cholera of most concern. More frequent
storms pose a grave threat to southern
Indian Ocean coastal countries and
island states. The increased risks are a

result of strong winds, heavy rainfall, and
ocean surges associated with category
five storms.

The developing countries and small
island states in the region cannot afford
large investment in infrastructure adap-
tation to protect against the threats of
tropical cyclones. In any given year, only
about 5% of the tropical cyclones that
form in the southern Indian Ocean make
landfall. However, they invariably have
devastating impacts on the livelihoods,
economies, and environments of the
countries affected.

The Poorly Understood Ocean

Some of the most severe impacts
of climate change are being felt and will
continue to be felt in the Indian Ocean.
As | write this essay, the Washington Post
is reporting on Cyclone Kyarr, a storm on
the brink of category five status that is
threatening the Arabian Sea. The journal-
ist writes: “Cyclone Kyarr is a monster.
The Indian Ocean beast—dubbed a top-
tier ‘super cyclonic storm’ by the Indian
Meteorological Department—is the first
storm of such intensity to rage in the
Arabian Sea in 12 years.”2!

On December 26, 2004, | became
aware of and came to fear the destructive
power of the sea. On that day, a mag-
nitude 9.1 earthquake struck beneath
the Indian Ocean, generating a mas-
sive tsunami that claimed more than
230,000 lives in fourteen countries. It
was one of the deadliest natural disasters
ever recorded. While Mauritius was not
affected by that tsunami, | was afraid
of a wall of water coming from nowhere
and taking my home and neighborhood
away. It haunted me. Today, | know
there is much more than tsunamis to
fear and much more that can take our
homes away. Deadly floods, category five
cyclones, sea level rise, and the biggest
of all: climate change.

| have seen the Indian Ocean change
dramatically in my lifetime, and | am
only in my twenties. All scientists agree
that these changes are not about to end.

186

Despite recent gains in knowledge, the
Indian Ocean remains poorly understood.
In the face of climate change, the Indian
Ocean will be a hot topic of conversa-
tion. We will need much more than talk
though. | hope the Indian Ocean can—
like it has done so well for so long—bring
people together, not displace individuals
and drive communities apart.

Zara Currimjee, born and raised in Mauritius, manages the office
of the CEO at Oceana, the largest advocacy organization focused
solely on ocean conservation in the world. She holds an MA in
international environmental policy from the Middlebury Institute
of International Studies and a BA in environmental biology and
maritime studies from Williams College. At Oceana she previously
worked on feasibility studies and campaigned against harmful
fisheries subsidies. Currimjee co-produced Vey nou Lagon, an
award-winning documentary that shows how fishermen forged
solutions to the fisheries crisis in Mauritius. She has also designed
and implemented sustainable financing mechanisms for ocean
management in small Caribbean islands with the Waitt Institute.

1 “Penny Siopis: Warm Water Imaginaries,” Stevenson, https://www
stevenson. info/exhibition/3917.

2 Raleigh R. Hood, Michael J. McPhaden, and Ed Urban, “New Indian
Ocean Program Builds on a Scientific Legacy,” EOS, Transactions,
American Geophysical Union 95, no. 39 (Sept. 2014): 349-60.

3 Mathew Koll Roxy et al., “The Curious Case of Indian Ocean Warm-
ing,” Journal of Climate 27, no. 22 (Nov. 4, 2014): 8501-9, https://
doi.org/10.1175/jcli-d-14-00471.1.

4 PedroN. Dinezio et al., “Glacial Changes in Tropical Climate Ampli-
fied by the Indian Ocean,” Science Advances 4, no. 12 (Dec. 12,
2018), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aat9658.

5 David Michel, “Environmental Pressures in the Indian Ocean,” in
Indian Ocean Rising: Maritime Security and Policy Challenges, ed.
David Michel and Russell Sticklor (Washington, DC: Stimson, July
2012), 115, https://www.stimson.org/content/indian-ocean-rising
-maritime-security-and-policy-challenges.

6 Mohideen Wafar et al., “State of Knowledge of Coastal and Marine
Biodiversity of Indian Ocean Countries,” PLOS ONE 6, no. 1 (Jan.
31, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0014613.

7 David Obura et al., Reviving the Western Indian Ocean Economy:
Actions for a Sustainable Future (Gland: WWF International, 2017),
64, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents
/13692WWF2. pdf.

8 _ The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2010 (Rome: Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO Fisheries and
Aquaculture Department, 2010), 11, http:/Awww.fao.org/3/i1820e
/i1820e00.htm.

9 Fisheries and Aquaculture, 30.

10 Fisheries and Aquaculture, 65.

187

Obura et al., Western Indian Ocean Economy, 7. The State of

the Indian
Mathew Koll Roxy et al., “A Reduction in Marine Primary Produc-
tivity Driven by Rapid Warming over the Tropical Indian Ocean,” Ocean:
Geophysical Research Letters 43 (Dec. 18, 2015): 826-33, https:// _A Scientific
doi.org/10.1002/2015gl066979. ;
Perspective

Fisheries and Aquaculture, 35.

“Impacts of Mass Coral Die-Off on Indian Ocean Reefs Revealed,”
ScienceDaily, Feb. 20, 2017, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases
/2017/02/170220190632.htm.

P. Swapna et al., “Multidecadal Weakening of Indian Summer Mon-
soon Circulation Induces an Increasing Northern Indian Ocean Sea
Level,” Geophysical Research Letters 44 (Sept. 17, 2017): 10560—
72, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017g1074706.

Matt Simon, “Jakarta Is Sinking: Now Indonesia Has to Find a New
Capital,” Wired, May 2, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/jakarta
-is-sinking/.

Hartwig Schafer, “Bracing for Climate Change Is a Matter of Survival
for the Maldives,” World Bank Blogs, Jan. 20, 2019, https://blogs.
worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/bracing-climate-change
-matter-survival-maldives.

Tim P. Barnett et al., “Penetration of Human-Induced Warming into
the World’s Oceans,” Science 309, no. 5732 (Aug. 2005): 284—87,
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1112418.

Jennifer M. Fitchett, “Recent Emergence of CAT5 Tropical Cyclones
in the South Indian Ocean,” South African Journal of Science 114,
nos. 11—12 (2018): 1-6, https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2018
/4426.

“Cyclones Idai and Kenneth,” OCHA, 2019, https://www.unocha.org
/southern-and-eastern-africa-rosea/cyclones-idai-and-kenneth.

Matthew Cappucci, “Category 4 Kyarr Is the Strongest Cyclone
over the Arabian Sea in 12 Years,” Washington Post, Oct. 28, 2019,
https:/Awww.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/10/28/category
-kyarr-is-strongest-cyclone-over-arabian-sea-years/.

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